Ancestry DIGITAL

Request: 9eb48faa-0b42-4e97-a5b5-3e450e5e4896 Audit date: 8 October 2026 Scope: Ancestry.com and controlled entities/brands. Parent and investor evidence is marked as indirect and is not attributed to Ancestry without a direct nexus.

Entity boundary and ownership

Blackstone-managed private-equity funds completed the $4.7 billion acquisition of Ancestry on 4 December 2020, with GIC retaining a significant minority stake.¹ Current Ancestry disclosures identify Ancestry.com Operations LP and Ancestry.com DNA LLC among the U.S. operating entities, and Ancestry Ireland Unlimited Company and Ancestry International DNA LLC for relevant non-U.S. operations.² Ancestry’s terms effective 12 May 2026 identify Ancestry, AncestryDNA, Newspapers.com, Find a Grave, Fold3, Forces War Records, Archives and related brands as services within its current ecosystem.³

Ancestry acquired French genealogy company Geneanet in November 2021.⁴ Howard Hochhauser became President and CEO effective 1 February 2025, with Mark Thompson as chairman.⁵ Ancestry’s current leadership page also identifies Blackstone executives David Kestnbaum and Sachin Bavishi in Ancestry board roles, supporting the continuing Blackstone governance nexus.⁶

No reviewed Ancestry corporate disclosure established a control relationship with MyHeritage or GEDmatch, so their technology, data and Israel-related activities are outside this target audit.^{2, 3, 4} The current AncestryDNA availability page lists 119 countries and does not list Israel; this supports only the narrower finding that current AncestryDNA kit availability is not advertised for Israel, not that every Ancestry web service is unavailable there.⁷

Authoritative-source screening

The current full A/HRC/63/20 advance edited report of 25 September 2026 was also checked, including its annexes. No Ancestry entry was identified. This database covers only its specified settlement-related activities, and remaining submitted enterprises have not all been assessed; absence is a bounded screen, not a universal clearance.⁸

UN A/HRC/59/23 discusses Amazon/AWS and Project Nimbus in its technology section but does not provide target-specific evidence that Ancestry participates in Nimbus or supplies technology to Israeli state bodies.⁹ A retrievable 2025 OHCHR Special Procedures communication confirms that the OHCHR settlement-business database was updated in 2023 and contained 97 listed enterprises; targeted research identified no public evidence tying Ancestry or the controlled brands above to settlement-business activity.¹⁰

No public evidence identified in the reviewed Who Profits, AFSC, UN/OHCHR and Ancestry primary-source searches that Ancestry itself is named for technology provision to settlements, Israeli military/intelligence bodies or Israeli state surveillance programmes.^{2, 9, 10}

Enterprise Technology Stack & Vendor Relationships

Israeli-origin software and services

Ancestry’s current cookie table identifies Taboola as the provider of the t_gid cookie, used for attribution/reporting and recommendation tailoring, and Klear as the provider associated with the clear-aff-track campaign-conversion cookie.¹¹ Taboola separately publishes an Ancestry/Performics case study describing Ancestry’s use of Taboola video advertising in the United Kingdom, establishing a direct commercial marketing relationship.¹² Taboola’s 2025 Form 10-K states that Taboola is incorporated under Israeli law, has core R&D in Tel Aviv and operates data centres that include Israel.¹³

Meltwater’s April 2021 acquisition announcement described Klear as an Israeli SaaS influencer-marketing company.¹⁴ The current Ancestry cookie table lists a Klear-labelled campaign-attribution integration, while the 2021 Meltwater source establishes Klear’s Israeli origin. The composite list describes cookies that may be placed across sites and regions; it does not establish activation for every visitor or a current paid Klear contract.^{11, 14}

The evidenced Taboola and Klear functions are marketing/advertising and campaign attribution, peripheral to Ancestry’s core genealogy/genomics infrastructure.^{11, 12} No reviewed source shows that Ancestry genetic information is supplied to Taboola or Klear; Ancestry’s current privacy statement says genetic information is not shared with third-party marketers or advertisers.¹⁵

No public evidence identified of current Ancestry licensing or integration with Check Point, Wiz, SentinelOne, CyberArk, NICE, Verint, Claroty, Palo Alto Networks or another named Israeli-origin security platform in the reviewed legal, privacy, cookie and technical disclosures.^{15, 11}

Scale of cloud dependency

AWS is a material technology dependency. AWS states that Ancestry moved business-critical workloads involving about 10 PB of data, 400 applications and 6,000 instances to AWS and uses more than 30 AWS services.¹⁶ AWS also documents AncestryDNA’s use of Amazon EFS for genomics research.¹⁷ In August 2025, an Ancestry-authored AWS technical post described a centralized Amazon S3/Iceberg data lake, Amazon EMR on EC2, tables of roughly 20–100 billion rows and about 7 million hourly changes used by machine-learning models and analysts.¹⁸

Ancestry’s current privacy statement says its web and mobile services are cloud based and that user data resides with cloud-service vendors.¹⁵ These sources establish substantial AWS use, but they do not prove that AWS is Ancestry’s sole cloud provider or identify the physical AWS region used for every data class.^{15, 16, 18}

Procurement and integrators

Performics is publicly documented as the agency partner in the Ancestry/Taboola UK advertising campaign.¹² no public evidence identified of a major systems integrator deploying Israeli-origin cybersecurity, cloud or enterprise software into Ancestry’s core infrastructure.^{16, 11, 12}

Surveillance, Biometrics & Retail Technology

Facial recognition and biometrics

Ancestry’s current Face Match feature uses AI to compare faces in user-selected photos with faces of deceased people in public member trees and historical photo/yearbook collections; the user must choose to run the feature and review suggested matches.¹⁹ Ancestry’s current privacy statement says it may create an abstract numerical representation to group similar faces, that the representation may qualify as biometric information in some jurisdictions, and that Ancestry does not retain or store that representation.¹⁵

No public evidence identified that Face Match uses Trigo, BriefCam, AnyVision/Oosto, Trax or another Israeli-origin facial-recognition/biometric vendor.^{15, 19}

Predictive analytics and monitoring

No public evidence identified of Ancestry use of Israeli-origin predictive-policing, sentiment-analysis, social-media-monitoring or workforce-surveillance tools.^{15, 11}

Third-party deployment

No public evidence identified that Israeli-origin surveillance or biometric technology reaches Ancestry indirectly through a managed-security provider or bundled enterprise suite.^{15, 11, 19}

Cloud Infrastructure, Data Residency & Sovereign Cloud Participation

Data residency and the Data-Exposure Principle

Ancestry publicly confirms extensive AWS use for core workloads and genomics, while its privacy statement says all user data resides with cloud-service vendors.^{15, 16, 17, 18} The reviewed Ancestry/AWS materials do not identify an Israel region for Ancestry workloads, so no public evidence identified that Ancestry customer or genetic data is stored or processed in AWS’s Israel (Tel Aviv) Region.^{16, 17, 18, 20}

AWS launched its Israel (Tel Aviv) Region in August 2023 and states that customers can store data in Israel through that region.²⁰ AWS also states that it was selected in 2021 as a primary cloud provider for Project Nimbus.²⁰ Israel’s State Comptroller reported in 2021 that the Ministry of Defense, acting for the IDF, was expected to join Nimbus and consume services from the winning supplier; the IDF had decided to join for transfer of unclassified systems, and the Ministry/IDF participated in tender preparation and bid evaluation.²¹ This establishes planned framework participation, without proving any particular military workload was ultimately deployed with either provider.²¹ UN A/HRC/59/23 likewise describes Amazon/AWS and Google as Project Nimbus providers.⁹ These are AWS/provider-level facts and do not establish Ancestry participation in Nimbus or Ancestry data residency in Israel.^{20, 21, 9}

Ancestry hosts Israel-related historical genealogy collections, including collections associated with Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa and other Israel-related immigration/history records.²² The reviewed Ancestry collection page does not establish current Israeli-government data transfer, Israeli hosting, or Israeli legal access to current Ancestry customer data.²²

Law-enforcement access

Ancestry’s law-enforcement guide is dated 12 November 2019 [pre-2020] and remains publicly available; it says Ancestry does not voluntarily cooperate with law enforcement, identifies U.S. and Irish Ancestry entities for account-data access, and describes subpoena, court-order and warrant requirements for different data categories including DNA.²³ Ancestry’s report titled January–December 2025, published 27 February 2026, records zero valid DNA requests, no valid international requests, and no national-security requests reported as of 31 December 2025.²⁴ The English calendar-year DNA line and a localized July–December DNA line differ, so the exact period is not treated as uniformly established across renditions.²⁴ The 2019 guide is historical evidence that remains live; the 2025 transparency report provides the more recent operational disclosure.^{23, 24}

Data-centre operations in Israel

No public evidence identified that Ancestry itself operates, leases or co-locates a data centre in Israel.^{2, 15, 16}

Government cloud contracts

No public evidence identified that Ancestry is a Project Nimbus supplier, subcontractor or Israeli government cloud contractor.^{20, 21, 9}

Data sovereignty and resilience services

No public evidence identified that Ancestry provides data-sovereignty, sovereign-cloud or infrastructure-resilience services to Israeli state institutions or military bodies.^{2, 3, 21}

Defence, Intelligence & Security Sector Technology Relationships

Military and intelligence contracts

No public evidence identified of a contract, partnership or service agreement between Ancestry and the Israeli Ministry of Defense, IDF, Israeli intelligence agencies or another Israeli state-security body.^{2, 3, 21, 9}

AWS, a documented Ancestry cloud supplier, separately describes its Project Nimbus provider role, while the State Comptroller documents planned Ministry of Defense/IDF participation in the framework.^{16, 20, 21} That establishes a shared vendor relationship at AWS level; it does not establish technology provision from Ancestry to those bodies.^{16, 21}

Dual-use technology provision

Ancestry provides genealogy, genomics, records-search and AI-assisted matching services, and its terms prohibit users from using the services for law-enforcement purposes or criminal proceedings.^{3, 19} no public evidence identified that Ancestry’s general-purpose technology has been deployed by Israeli military, intelligence or law-enforcement bodies for surveillance in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territory.^{3, 23, 24}

Offensive cyber and weapons technology

No public evidence identified of Ancestry developing, selling, licensing or maintaining offensive cyber capabilities, zero-day exploit tools, digital weapons or purpose-built military targeting systems.^{2, 3, 18}

AI, Algorithmic & Autonomous Systems

AI/ML provision to state bodies

Ancestry uses machine learning internally for large-scale genealogy/data workloads and provides Face Match as a consumer AI feature.^{18, 19} no public evidence identified that Ancestry provides AI, machine learning, computer vision or autonomous decision-support systems to Israeli state, military or security bodies.^{18, 19, 21}

Training data and model development

The 2025 AWS technical post says Ancestry’s large data-lake tables are used by machine-learning models and analysts, while Face Match compares user-selected photographs with deceased-person images in Ancestry collections.^{18, 19} no public evidence identified that Ancestry models are trained on intercepted communications, Israeli state-surveillance datasets or surveillance-derived civilian data from the occupied Palestinian territory.^{18, 19, 22}

Autonomous systems and lethality

No public evidence identified that Ancestry provides autonomous target generation, automated threat detection, autonomous tracking or other systems designed primarily to enable kinetic military effects.^{2, 3, 18}

Technology Ecosystem & R&D Footprint

Israeli R&D centres and research partners

No public evidence identified of an Ancestry-owned engineering office, R&D centre, innovation lab or accelerator in Israel.^{2, 6, 25} Ancestry’s current research-collaboration page identifies Stanford School of Medicine as a current collaboration and labels Calico and NMDP collaborations as concluded; it does not identify an Israeli university or research institution among the collaborations shown.²⁵

Acquisitions and investments

Ancestry’s 2021 acquisition of Geneanet was an acquisition of a French genealogy company.⁴ no public evidence identified of Ancestry itself acquiring an Israeli technology company or making a strategic investment in an Israeli technology startup or venture fund.^{2, 4}

Blackstone’s relationship is indirect parent/controller context. Blackstone announced a new Tel Aviv office in April 2021 to pursue Israeli growth and technology investments; the announcement said office head Yifat Oron had previously worked in the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s R&D directorate.²⁶ In May 2024 Blackstone announced an agreement for Blackstone Growth and affiliates to acquire a majority stake in Tel Aviv-based Priority Software.²⁷ no public evidence identified connecting those Blackstone activities or Priority Software to Ancestry procurement, Ancestry customer data or Ancestry product delivery.^{6, 26, 27}

Patent and intellectual property

Public patent-family records show Ancestry.com Operations Inc. filed Israeli application IL280091A on 11 January 2021 concerning genealogical entity resolution, and Ancestry.com DNA LLC filed Israeli application IL280748A on 9 February 2021 concerning phenotype prediction using recommender systems.^{28, 29} These filings establish IP-protection activity in the Israeli patent jurisdiction; the records do not establish an Israeli co-developer, Israeli research institution, Israeli R&D centre or Israeli data-hosting arrangement.^{28, 29}

Controlling principals

Current Ancestry leadership material identifies Blackstone executives in Ancestry board roles, while Blackstone’s own disclosures establish a separate Israeli investment office and Israeli portfolio investment activity.^{6, 26, 27} no public evidence identified in the reviewed primary material tying Ancestry’s current CEO, chairman or named Ancestry directors personally to stakes in NSO, Cellebrite, Carbyne, Oosto/AnyVision, Wiz, Check Point, SentinelOne, Verint, NICE or another named Israeli surveillance/cyber/military-technology firm.^{5, 6, 26, 27}

Civil Society Scrutiny & Regulatory History

NGO, academic and UN reports

No public evidence identified of a reviewed UN, NGO or academic report specifically alleging that Ancestry provides technology to the Israeli state, military, intelligence bodies or settlements.^{9, 10} A/HRC/59/23 does discuss Ancestry’s cloud supplier Amazon/AWS in connection with Project Nimbus, but the report does not establish an Ancestry role in that programme.^{16, 9}

Boycott and divestment campaigns

No public evidence identified of an organised boycott, divestment or sanctions campaign specifically targeting Ancestry for technology provision to Israel or settlements in the reviewed authoritative-source and corporate searches.^{9, 10}

Regulatory and legal actions

No public evidence identified of an Israel-specific regulatory inquiry, export-control action, sanctions investigation or legal challenge concerning Ancestry technology sales or services to Israeli state entities.^{23, 24, 9} Ancestry’s 2025 transparency report instead provides general law-enforcement-request statistics and reports no valid international information requests in 2025.²⁴

Cross-cutting checks

Constructive notice after 19 July 2024 and November 2024

The 2025 OHCHR communication records the 19 July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion context and subsequent international-law developments, while A/HRC/59/23 was published in 2025 and discusses the technology/cloud ecosystem around Israeli state operations.^{9, 10} Ancestry’s AWS relationship was still publicly documented in 2025, including its large AWS-hosted data lake.¹⁸ However, because no direct Ancestry technology provision to Israeli state, military or settlement bodies was established, no target-specific continuation of such provision after those notice dates can be verified.^{18, 21, 9, 10}

Settlement nexus

No public evidence identified of Ancestry providing digital products, cloud services, biometric tools or enterprise technology specifically to Israeli settlements or settlement authorities.^{9, 10} The reviewed evidence establishes Ancestry’s use of AWS and AWS’s separate Nimbus role, but no source links Ancestry’s AWS workloads to settlement service delivery.^{16, 20, 21, 9}

Supplementary factual scope and data-handling clarification

The published cookie table describes Taboola assigning a persistent unique user identifier and tailoring recommendations from advertiser/publisher interactions. This behavioural identifier evidence is distinct from genetic information; no source here establishes that it is anonymous, but neither does the table establish an Ancestry-specific processing region, state access or deployment into a state/security system.¹¹ The cookie table is composite across Ancestry sites and listed cookies may vary by site and region; the presence of a Klear entry is a disclosed possible integration rather than proof of an uninterrupted paid contract.¹¹

Blackstone-managed funds’ control and Blackstone directors on Ancestry’s board are documented separately from any contract between Ancestry and a particular Blackstone investment.^{1, 6} Earlier parent-context descriptions identify which entity performed an act; the reviewed public sources do not establish complete capital independence, trace all fund flows, or resolve operational integration among those entities.^{1, 6, 26, 27}