Information gets added to your Private People list in several ways.
The Private People list identifies all of the living and confidential people who are in your private tree (your "FamilySearch tree").
Names of living and confidential people added to a family group tree do not get added to the Private People list.
Living people
When you add a living person to your private tree, that person is added to the Private People list. Living people also show up on this list if their information was merged from Ancestral File.
Confidential people
System administrators can determine that a Family Tree person must be confidential. If you added the name, the record moves to your private tree. Status as living or deceased does not impact confidential records in Family Tree.
The need to make a person's record confidential is rare. The standards required to set a record as confidential are high, and it is a status that you cannot request.
Transition to personal Family Tree
In August 2014, FamilySearch changed how the information about living and confidential people was handled.
During this transition, FamilySearch created copies of the living and confidential people whose data you could see in Family Tree. We put the copies into the Private People list in Family Tree, and you can see them when you display your information in Family Tree.