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While I can sympathize with the gedcom snatching, and forced mergers of files that proliferates incorrect information on a family, I don't understand the other issues.

If you didn't have the information of the living people's names and birthdates, etc on your file, then that information had to come from somewhere. Could it have come from public information (public records, newspaper birth announcements, wedding announcements, obituaries, etc)? If so, what is the issue?

Genealogists have been publishing birth and marrige information on living people for centuries...yes centuries...without outcry from the public. It is not illegal, never has been. Lately, because of easy access on the internet, some have called it immoral or unethical. It is neither unethical or immoral to publish public information on the living, it never has been. Just because a few vocalize that stance doesn't make it so.

The internet puts a great deal of information at our fingertips. We can find wonderful medical resources that were never easily availible to us, we can get news in a flash, children can research for their homework from sources never before availible to them. We can also find out what convicted sexual preditors are living in our neighborhood, we can look for missing children, we can find the best price for that stereo we want. And yes, we can also gather genealogical information on the living and the dead, as always, just faster. The internet makes availible large databases, we'd be foolish to think that somehow information on the living, which has always been availible in print form, would be somehow filtered out on the internet.

The point you make about them not being related is rather a silly point. If that were applied to other genealogical sources then we'd have to criticize anyone who published (in print or on the net) a survey of a cemetery, after all, 99% of the residents there could be unrelated to them. Anyone who wrote a history of their town would also be critized for writing about those who weren't related to them. When someone publishes a genealogical database, it is about sharing that data with other researchers.

Publishing faulty and incorrect links is a valid complaint, and for those, keep it up with the post'ems. As for the info on the living, welcome to the internet, where public information is public.