141–150 of 458 posts
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I did it 6/7 years ago because the novelty, and enthusiastically recommended it to family and friends. Now I regret doing it considering how Google and Facebook has abused consumer data. I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.
They already have 1/2 of your kids DNA.
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It occurs to me that they could have followed the software trend where everything is a subscription service. As more is learned from the genome, they can deliver more value to the customers over time.
Yeah, it seems like a major mistake to sell this as a one-time purchase. Market it as "genetic monitoring" Charge a monthly or yearly fee to keep getting new genetic insights as research discovers the function of more mutations. Offer upsell re-tests with more complete or accurate sequencing. I think they must have been banking on the data-set itself being highly valuable and made the tests cheap, then ran out of cus…
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I did it 6/7 years ago because the novelty, and enthusiastically recommended it to family and friends. Now I regret doing it considering how Google and Facebook has abused consumer data. I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.
IIRC you can request the data to be deleted. You have no way of knowing if it's been done correctly, but at least it's something you could do to prevent your kid's DNA from effectively being there.
It won't protect you from nefarious actors with the data right now, but it will potentially protect you from nefarious actors who may someday get ahold of the db.
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That's not quite true. Your DNA doesn't change, but 23andMe only does partial sequences on those test kits. As new techniques become available they can't necessarily retest old samples, so customers who want more complete results in the future will likely have to buy and submit new kits.
I've never seen them push that as a marketing angle. As a 23andMe customer from a couple years ago, it never even occured to me to try re-running the results.
"Remember the thing we sold you before? Well, it wasn't that great. But now it is. Give us more money?"
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Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would've dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it. You only need these kinds of results once because your DNA doesn't change. I knew people who were giving or had gotten these as gifts, but those are one-off purchases. And if you've heard of people doing it then you'll do it too but that's also a one-off. I don't think I'd personally benefit because…
I did it 6/7 years ago because the novelty, and enthusiastically recommended it to family and friends. Now I regret doing it considering how Google and Facebook has abused consumer data. I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.
Anybody have any ideas about this? Why would they slow down the "growth and scaling efforts" (as the cnbc article claims) even despite lower-than expected sales, when the data from kits is what gives them the unique(?) capability to discover novel drug compounds at a massively reduced cost compared to traditional pharma companies.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-09/23andme-l...
Everyone paying attention the pattern of layoffs? Ebay, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, 23andMe, Intel... Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.
They sold 10M kits, and they primarily market in the US. DNA never changes, so you have a lifetime max of 1 purchase of 23andMe per lifetime. Their competitors have likely sold 15-30M as well, so maybe 30-40M of these kits have been sold. That's 10% of US market. What's the max conceivable penetration here? 20%?
Your germ line genome rarely changes. Your exome changes all the time. Your gut biome changes all the time. There's massive market opportunity but a ton of regulations around how to tap into that market opportunity. On a separate note, Ancestry is going through a similar issue. They've had double digit revenue declines in their DNA testing suite. The truth around 23andMe and Ancestry is that they're really doing a su…
> Wojcicki has theories Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for. Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in…
Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would've dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it. You only need these kinds of results once because your DNA doesn't change. I knew people who were giving or had gotten these as gifts, but those are one-off purchases. And if you've heard of people doing it then you'll do it too but that's also a one-off. I don't think I'd personally benefit because…
Monthly/yearly subscription to updates of some sort
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The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) specifically prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage or setting rates based on such tests.
Thank goodness for that. They definitely won't break that law. Nope. Corporations don't do that.
Similarly, there was a very recent article about how GINA might be acting as a privacy law, since companies would prefer just not to know:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/genetic-bia...
But then, there's about zero useful information in genetic information when it comes to hiring. If there were useful information, I'm sure we'd see far more violations.
I'm far more concerned about access to life insurance, which is not covered by GINA.
Also, it's very unlikely that a 23andMe type test will have enough clinical information that would be useful even for life insurance purposes or health insurance purposes. Clinical genetic testing is far more powerful that way.