Birthdate security

I am thinking about adding the birthdates of all of our grandchildren and greatgrandchildren to my family tree, but my wife is afraid of a security issue with this. Are there any guidelines from Family. Search about this?

From FamilySearch online help:

Family Tree protects the privacy of living people by restricting who can see their records. You can see the record of a living person only if you created the record. The system hides records you create of living people from everyone else, including the people themselves and other family members.

Note: Although Family Tree records for living people are private, the memories attached to them are potentially viewable by anyone, whether or not they are registered users.

Because of privacy laws, living people are only visible to you. If your FamilySearch account becomes deactivated, any information under your account for living people becomes inaccessible/deleted. For that reason, there isn't any community benefit in adding living descendants to the tree – the only benefit would be for your own use.

Ultimately, FamilySearch is designed for organizing and keeping track of deceased individuals – while it provides basic functionality for living individuals, it's not designed for that. There are other tools, like address books, that allow you to keep track of things like addresses, contact information, favorite colors, etc., or to put birthdates and anniversaries on a calendar.

Is it deleted, or is it inaccessible until 110 years have passed from their date of birth (or whatever rule is in place at that time to assume they are deceased)?

According to this FamilySearch article:

In most cases, the person's record becomes public after you add a death date to it. The Family Tree does not compute the likelihood that a person in a private space is alive, even if the information on the record shows that the person was born more than 110 years ago.

I interpret that as meaning that a "living" person in the tree doesn't become automatically visible, even after 110 years. The only way for a private record to become visible is for the person who created the record to add a death date. If you (as the creator of the record) are the parent or grandparent, hopefully it would be rare that you would need to do that.

In my own tree, I add living relatives only if they 1) are a parent or grandparent that connects me to the tree, or 2) are older extended family members that will likely pass away in my lifetime.

Living persons are simply a "bridge" to our deceased ancestors and descendants. For me, I only enter the person's name and mark them as living. No other information is required. Where I have 7 living children (and one deceased grandchild), there is a possibility of many copies of each one in various individual "living person" records. When those individuals die, if they are all marked as deceased, there will be plenty of duplicates to merge, but FamilySearch is well aware of this.

I suppose one could use FamilySearch to be a repository of birthdates of living individuals, but it wasn't designed for that and may not be the best tool. However, I do personally believe it would be safe to do so from a data security perspective. I'm sure the folks at FamilySearch are aware of the various privacy laws in the world and how to comply with them.

Agreed that adding birthdates should be safe from a data security perspective. FamilySearch has a lot of personal information stored and would be in a lot of hot water if it didn't have procedures in place to protect it – I'm confident that they have security in mind.