2010-02-10 MyZooof

MyHeritage

Zooof Scoop

On 2010 Feb 8, Zooof announced that it has been bought by MyHeritage. That wasn’t news, it was merely an official confirmation of Rob van Drie’s Zooof Scoop: when he went to visit the MyHeritage site after the announcement of the Verwandt acquisition to check out the tree he had made on Verwant.nl, he noticed that MyHeritage had his Zooof tree as well.
He reported the Zooof Scoop on his Dutch blog in MyHeritage koopt Verwandt: wat merken wij in Nederland daarvan? and I broke the news to English readers in MyHeritage growing through acquisitions.

small

Zooof 2010

Zooof is a minor acquisition. The webshot of the Zooof home page includes its statistics at the time of the take over.
Although Zooof supports 45 languages, it has never been a huge success.
At the time of the press release, the Zooof home page claimed a total of 9.814 family builders and 347.916 family members; 178.358 men & 168.577 women in 132 countries.

royal tree

By the way, if the image of the woman at the bottom right looks familiar, That’s because it is an official portrait of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Her family tree is pretty well known in Netherlands, and that guy that Zooof relates her too is neither her husband nor a son. The tree shown on the Zooof home is a royal mistake.

Zooof

It’s Our Tree points out that the Verwandt Terms and Conditions clearly promise to inform users at least four weeks before a take-over by a third party. That would allow users to delete their trees if they so desire, but the users were not informed about the take-over at all, and transfer of all the users’ trees and photos from Verwandt to MyHeritage was started weeks before either Verwandt or MyHeritage announced the acquisition of Verwandt by MyHeritage.

MyHeritage seems to have handled the take-over of Zooof in a similar manner. Zooof did not immediately email its users about take-over, but let MyHeritage copy the data first. In fact, Zooof did not email its users at all.
Even worse, the phone number listed on their site has been unassigned for months and the email sent to the address listed on their site bounces.

That MyHeritage bought Zooof was not discovered because Zooof informed its users. It was discovered before either Zooof or MyHeritage issued a press release because the Zooof data was already on the MyHeritage site before anyone was informed about it.

violation

The way MyHeritage and Zooof handled the take-over seems in violation of Zooof’s own Terms and Conditions as well as its Privacy Policy.

Zooof Terms and Conditions

The Zooof Terms and Conditions promise to inform users through a written notice before transferring control to a third party:

10. TRANSFERENCE

10.1 None of the parties mentioned in these Terms have the right to transfer obligations coming forth from any agreement between aforementioned parties, except in the case of (partly) transfer of Zooof.com’s operational management, and even than only after prior written notice by Zooof.com.

Zooof Privacy Policy

The Zooof Privacy Policy promises to fully inform its users in case of a take-over:

ZOOOF.com can provide users’ personal data to third parties in case of a company takeover or when ZOOOF.com B.V. is placed under the control of a trustee or receiver in case of bankruptcy or liquidation. In these cases, users will be notified by e-mail of all developments concerning ZOOOF.com B.V.

Zooof did not fully inform its users. Zooof did not email its users at all. It is even doubtful that they could have done so had they tried, as Zooof management did not even bother to keep their own email address or phone number operational.

updates

2011-04-24 broken Zooof links

The Zooof domain is no more. The Zooof: Terms of Use & Zooof: Privacy Statement links have been replaced with WayBack Machine links.