Doesn’t help that they immediately updated their user agreement to avoid responsibility. Nothing says give our product a chance like that.
I don’t trust them or anyone else with my data, let alone my DNA
Well someone’s not getting reborn 200M years from now in Cenozoic Park.
Dun dun! Dun duuun! Dun-da daaa da-dun dun daaaah! flails silly human arms RAAAH!!!
“They do move in herds!”
That’s why I prefer to let mosquitos bite me.
Mr. DNA‽ Where did you come from‽
that stuff that you breathe out, slough off and leave literally every places youve ever been? yeah, need to keep that under wraps.
Except that leaving it somewhere is like a pseudonym. It would take a lot of effort to pinpoint to once specific person unless that person was already the sole target - then you just get a sample at their home.
Also, breathing out DNA?
It’s not necessary for the person to be the sole target.
By comparing the persons DNA to 2 or 3 relatives in a database, it’s quite easy to identify whose DNA you have, or at least narrow it down to a few potentials. (E.g. the DNA is from a male that is a cousin of X by the male line and nephew of Y by the female line).
all dna is interconnected as all humans are sourced from the same source dna. at some point, we will have enough dna in a database to be able to pinpoint almost any sample to anyone or their family closest in that dataset. it will eventually just be everyone. the set doesnt change, it will just grow as more people are added and its ‘accidentally’ released. its inevitable.
retrieving any humans dna you really want is fairly trivial. we need only minute traces anymore, and it gets less as amplification techniques improve. they already have molecular sniffing devices in all major airports. not for dna, but you get the idea.
ha, yes when you breathe you exhale a lot of particulate into the air, and guess what, its laden with your dna.
personally, i could not care less. have my dna, do what you will with it. oh noooes you have all of the numbers of me… whateverwillido?!
realistically, its only valuable in aggregate.
the only real concern ive ever heard was corporations making decisions on peoples dna, and that can be trivially circumvented by extending discrimination laws.
Disingenuous at best
i care more about my amazon password leaking than anyone having my irrevocably unchangeable dna. why worry about it?
Found the 23&me CEO 👆
huh?
Don’t play dumb
i point out some basic facts about DNA and suddenly im some moron who thinks DNA is a business?
dont play idiot
Well first off it isn’t just you. It is your family as well. Maybe your cousin is more privacy minded and doesn’t appreciate it. Did you get their consent before you spit?
Secondly if you can’t think of how this could be misused you have a failure of imagination. We already know that a list of people with Jewish background leaked and it is an open question what happens next with that, but I highly doubt anything good. Maybe other minorities will be targeted next? Roma for example or the autistic. It doesn’t even have to be nightmarish like terrorism and tailored germs it could be boring oppression.
i get your fear, really, i do. ive never said it couldnt be abused. im saying dna is not private. its the worlds longest username.
it is a finite dataset. it will be inevitably be mapped across the entire planet, and guess what, it will be public.
you want to approach the Use of this data, go crazy. that is an important task.
i am personally not going to go around pretending my code is special or valuable or not publicly available.
you can do you, but at some point regardless of any activity on your part, you will be on the graph.
Right so just because something might happen eventually doesn’t absolve anyone of what we do today.
It is already understood that you don’t really have a right to privacy decades after your death. If someone wants to map out my DNA and sell it they can when I am dead and my kids are dead and my grandkids are dead with my blessing.
ha no, this is happening today. we are catching criminals today that are tangentially related to dna samples in databases all over the place. its not going to be multiple decades after death. the more data added. the easier it is today to be able triangulate people already related to you. because at the heart of the matter, we are all related.
the resolution will only get better in the next few years as we start slapping LLMs on it.
your dna has no value.
dna databases have value.
i agree, no need to wait on extending anti-discrimination laws. lets do it yesterday.
but again, my dna is not private, today.
Refreshing to have some sort of consequences for being negligent with people’s data
Too bad the consequences are not prison.
Hear hear
No, they’ve been heading south for years. I would have loved for it to be a drop in response to the data breach, but this was just a company that was run incompetently.
Which data were they negligent with? I thought it was breaches on other sites that gave reused passwords.
Credential stuffing is a well understood part of the threat landscape that 23 and me negligently failed to account for, allowing hackers to access 7 million people’s info after hacking only 14 thousand users.
…because those 7 million people opted into sharing their data with everyone else.
No, they opted to share varying degrees of information with authorized users and close genetic matches, and 23andMe failed to protect them from a large scale takeover of accounts that made public the kind of information the company had promised to keep private to semi-private.
14,000 accounts compromise by the same entity. That’s absolutely the fault of the platform, not the users.
You’re making a distinction without a difference. Nobody has any fucking clue who their “genetic match” will be nor does anyone have any fucking clue who else is using 23andMe. Sharing that information with other 23andMe users is not meaningfully different than just sharing it with the world at large.
It’s not the responsibility of your grandma who’s researching family history to be aware of potential data security threats. It’s the responsibility of the multimillion dollar online company with massive, valuable data troves to not offer a feature that was just a data breach waiting to happen.
I remember when the housing market crashed and hearing all these rich folks talk about how it is poor people who are responsible for not knowing they couldnt afford their homes.
Yeah so why exactly do we have a credit rating system if it isn’t rating credit?
You are completely correct. It is not on regular people to be experts on cyber security and somehow know that the company is doing their job and will do their job forever.
There are still all kinds of things a company can do to mitigate at least some of this. New browser, new location, forced two-factor auth, etc.
Cmon, we know their target market was dumbasses. How many dumbasses do you know that use mfa, or that actually look at a login notification before hitting “yes, it’s me”?
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You think it’s not already?
It wasn’t only because they didn’t need to buy it. They stole it instead
If you read the article, they partner with GSK. So it’s probably only going to them, not the open market. They openly say they’re researching genetic meds.
But hey, at least they got to expose their Jewish customers to Nazis before they went under…
For your entertainment:
If only they allowed more decimal points they could have been at 0.69420 !
Forward this to Elon Musk and he will make a buyout offer at that price.
Nah, he would puff himself up online and say he will buy it for $20 a share and then try and back out.
He would by at $69 just for the lols
Get ready for that data to be sold.
That’s pretty much been their business model from day 1. If they didn’t plan to sell it, there was no reason for them to keep it.
Yeah it was always going to come down to this. You can’t make a lot of money on a business model that involves a selling something only once per customer. Eventually they were going to have to either charge money for data storage or sell what they had.
There was no “eventually”. The whole point of their business was to sell it. They’ve been selling it since day one.
Exactly why I never even considered dealing with those DNA companies. They’re a privacy nightmare.
You can reset your password a whole lot easier than resetting your DNA.
Isn’t it already?
Fuck this company.
“Oh no, the consequences of my own actions!” - The CEO, probably
You think their self awareness is higher than I do
no
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It was always a scam. Glad they are dying.
It will be interesting to see what the company that buys all their data will do with it.
Sell it to insurance companies for even more profit!
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