Hi Margaret,
I too have the link on my page (I imagine everyone should have, so I don't know why your husband didn't). But I have mixed feelings about what your link describes.
On the one hand, I am keen to get as much out of my DNA to assist my family history, and I am happy to contribute to research. e.g I uploaded my results to DNALand, which hasn't assisted me with family history (though I hoped it might) but has contributed to research by Columbia University in the US. They too have surveys like the ones described for Ancestry.
I am not too worried about the privacy aspects. Maybe I am naive, but I can't imagine there being a problem there for me. But I do have a few doubts about Ancestry as a company. They seem to be very profit oriented (parhaps we could say "money-grabbing"), understandable in a private company, but there needs to be a balance between profit and service.
For example, when we subscribe to Ancestry our bank account gets billed automatically every month until we specifically cancel, so a few years ago I subscribed to Ancestry for a month or two and then cancelled, but somehow I must not have pressed the right button at the end and my subscription stayed open and I was billed for several months without my knowing or even looking at the site. Of course I didn't get any refund when I enquired about what happened. Contrast that to FindMyPast who I am currently subscribed to for a month, and that subscription ends unless I renew it. It's just a different approach, and I don't like Ancestry's way.
Another example is the analysis tools available at FTDNA and not available at Ancestry. It wouldn't be too hard for Ancestry to provide better tools, like the ability to download a match list, a chromosome browser, better searching, etc, but they have apparently refused to do so for years now. I think it is because this forces us to use the connection with trees as our main method of analysis, and of course that requires an ongoing subscription. Again, I may be ignorant, but it seems to me that Ancestry's main interest is in increasing my subscriptions.
With all this in mind, I can only assume that Ancestry sees this Project as another way to make money, either by selling our data to researchers, for whom it is valuable, or (more likely) partnering with a research company in using the data for research that will yield profitable outcomes. They get the benefit from our DNA and don't offer us much in return. In the end, I think this could be more profitable than selling the DNA kits in the first place.
So in the end I am suspicious, and I won't be participating until I am convinced that Ancestry is doing this for the public benefit, or until they offer something more to share the profits I reckon they will make out of this.
Maybe I'm ignorant and cynical, and have maligned Ancestry unfairly. I am happy to be convinced otherwise. But I'll wait and see.
