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23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

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Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#411

Post by ryanmercer »

hkai wrote: post #305
blackrock wrote: post #303

That’s what happens when bad press about your company comes out, and you’re too clueless to recognize it. Why do I really care about other people with similar genetics to me? This seems to be a greater risk for me, if I put myself into that database. And if someone else has a similar genetic as mine, and they commit a crime, then I’m automatically roped in as well. Do I really want the police knocking down my door, a…

I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy. I know at least two DNA companies that send your data to China for processing and yet nobody cares. So it may not be the reason of 23andme's problems - it might be just that the market is saturated. People who wanted to take the test, like me, already did it.

>I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy.

I don't care about most privacy. Will I put a bunch of cameras inside my residence, no. Beyond that I don't much care I mean I use RyanMercer everywhere (here, reddit, forums, social media) and even own 3 of the TLDs which all point to my blog that goes back nearly 20 years to high school where I said some crazy stuff that most people would wish scrubbed from record entirely but I leave them there because that's who I was 19 years ago, 18 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, last year.

There are 7.53 billion people, no one's singling me out trying to target me for something I said 20 years ago or for some gene I have that may or may not be expressed or for what YouTube video I liked in 2014.

Employers, and potential employers, know my credit history. I have a public bankruptcy. My address is public record as is the LLC I controlled and ultimately dissolved. If someone wants to know I Googled "has anyone microwaved an elephant" or "how many golf balls will fit in your large intestine" then I simply don't care.

It's public record my father died of cancer, it's public record his mother died of cancer, my mother has publicly shared she had cancer. I don't feel bad publicly talking about my alcoholism because I'm sure some record has been sold that my father was in inpatient treatment for his and his father had a DUI (as do 2 of my uncles I believe).

Don't watch me shower, don't watch me sleep, don't watch me have sex, don't watch me use the toiler and that's about all the privacy I worry about.

If you don't like me because of my bankruptcy, alcoholism, drug use as a teen, religious beliefs, my review of some movie from the mid 90's, then that's your problem not mine and if you want to preclude me from this or that because of it then good I don't want anything to do with you or your company/service/product.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#412

Post by thrownaway954 »

It kills me to think that they don't realize that their business is a fad and like all fads they fizzle out. couple with the fact that i'm almost certain they will share their information with anyone who is willing to pay them for it and you've got yourself a sinking ship.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#413

Post by blaser-waffle »

kenjackson wrote: post #397
zyang wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The technology is here now. If a bad actor wants your data they can easily get it without you submitting anything. Unless you protect your bodily fluids I think you should generally already consider your dna compromised.

TIL: A handful of opt-in companies can test DNA, ergo, all DNA is compromised so just roll over.

Presumably someone will be following behind me next week to hoover up any bodily fluids I leave when I get Starbucks, and on my way home from the gym.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#414

Post by dsd »

remmargorp64 wrote: post #295

I regret doing my 23andMe testing. I stopped trusting them when I realized how easy it would be for bad actors to abuse the system. I wish I could take it back and have them destroy the records and DNA sample but they literally won't let people do that (for some completely bullshit "legal" reason that makes no sense and is clearly a lie).

Where I work in the healthcare area, we are trying to expand from the us into Europe. And interesting legal question is how to honor Europe's right-to-be-forgotten laws with the US's HIPPA requirement to preserve health care data for X years. As an employee it also feels awkward.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#415

Post by blaser-waffle »

refurb wrote: post #280
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust the government more than a for profit corp for this.

Sure, but a for-profit Corp can’t arrest you, in prison you, or take away your rights.

Sure, but they can lobby heavily to make that a likelihood, e.g. For-Profit Prisons.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#416

Post by dsd »

ThrowawayH4MCb wrote: post #47

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons. A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling. The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell. I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy con…

Why would you build a completely separate lab in Phoenix?

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#417

Post by ryanmercer »

wutbrodo wrote: post #323
prepend wrote: post #277

I did this almost 8 years ago for the health insights and recommended it to a few dozen friends and family because the UI was nice, they added new reports, and they were the only low cost provider at the time that let me export my data. I loved the service and found an unknown sibling through the site. The FDA made them remove health insights so that made the service less useful. But two years ago they started sellin…

> The FDA made them remove health insights so that made the service less useful. I believe there are third-party sites that will still give you this information if you upload your raw data. Though of course, this has the downside of giving yet another party access to your data.

The 3rd party sites I've used don't ask for any identifying information though (unless you want to pay for paid features), it wouldn't surprise me if there were simply downloaded freeware that you could use to do it offline on a virtual machine if you even wanted.

A quick Google query leads me to this

>I recently wrote a small tool, Snappy, that can help you browse and interpret your raw data. Written in JavaScript, all processing is done on your browser, without transmitting sensitive data to any server. That also enables the tool to be used offline

https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/comments/6troyj/wrote_a_new...

So it does appear there are some sort of offline solutions for further exploring your raw data.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#418

Post by TeMPOraL »

katzgrau wrote: post #407
TeMPOraL wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words, with companies we know for sure the data will be abused badly, as much as possible. Governments are a wildcard; today they may actually protect this data and use it mostly responsibly. Tomorrow, they may bust your head for being related to someone or some group they don't like.

Not really, because many companies are owned by decent people who have a personal value system and their companies are reflections of that. Most business owners I've met are good and decent people. It's actually very hard to build a great company and team if you're aren't a genuinely decent person. When a company is sold or is subject to the interests of people divorced from the original mission and values of the com…

> because many companies are owned by decent people who have a personal value system and their companies are reflections of that

Sure. But in context of privacy, tell me, what personal value system is reflected in companies that suck in and process that data? I mean the marketing, the adtech, the data brokerage companies? Being charitable, I imagine it's "do well unto my customers (i.e. other companies); everyone else is irrelevant". Which I guess is defensible under the moral framework exploitative capitalism, but that doesn't satisfy me as one of those "everyone else" whose data gets processed. That people in companies that abuse my data have work ethics is not reassuring me in the slightest.

> When a company is sold or is subject to the interests of people divorced from the original mission and values of the company, problems will likely emerge.

I think almost all of companies are like that. In particular, VC-funded startups are like that from the day one - the investors are absolutely "divorced from the original mission and values of the company".

> their personal or collective self interests emerge to create issues regardless of their structure or purpose.

And my point is that if you look at the structure of these self interests, how they flow in the vector field of incentives, and if you look at what capabilities peoples, companies and governments have, the picture is pretty predictable: private companies will, on average, screw you over always, incessantly; governments (at least the western kind) will be friendly most of the time, but if and when they do decide to screw you up, the immediate consequences will be much worse.

Re: 23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

#420

Post by yesplorer »

k__ wrote: post #234
dragonwriter wrote: post #3

> Wojcicki has theories, but she doesn’t have clear proof for why consumers are shying away from getting tests Because the ones that want them have gotten them and there's no reason to ever buy the product again once you've done it once. I mean, smartphones are great, but the market for them would have hit a wall pretty quickly if no one ever had a reason to replace them after buying their first.

How come people usually only go to driving school once and these schools still make a living?

Simple: they're not venture-backed so no one is expecting billions from them.

23andMe could be a longer-term sustainable business but taking $700m from investors means you must keep growing even if there's no really opportunity for growth.

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