23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

happytiger wrote: post #226

pc86 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful you don't break something with those gymnastics. The immediate concern I had with this story is nefarious groups or individuals purchasing this data to target people with violence based on their ethnicities. Imagine if the genome of millions of Europeans was available on the black market in 1930s Europe.

That is one SOLID example of what could go wrong. It’s similar to the Office of Personnel Management data breach when every Federal Employee was just 0wn3d. It included 21.5 million background investigations into people and the personnel files of every federal employee and most contractors. Just slightly sensitive stuff. Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the hack, but I’m sure it was non-trivial becaus…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

skummetmaelk wrote: post #6

This disaster is the perfect counter-argument to those always saying "why do you care so much about privacy. It doesn't affect you when I share things. You can just choose not to do it", except no, I can't choose when we're relatives and you chose to share our genome. It is so obvious that your relatives sharing their genomic data with 23andMe reveals a lot of information about you. We can only hope people will reali…

Post by WendyTheWillow » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

skummetmaelk wrote: post #6

This disaster is the perfect counter-argument to those always saying "why do you care so much about privacy. It doesn't affect you when I share things. You can just choose not to do it", except no, I can't choose when we're relatives and you chose to share our genome. It is so obvious that your relatives sharing their genomic data with 23andMe reveals a lot of information about you. We can only hope people will reali…

Post by zamadatix » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:24 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #133

gcanyon wrote: post #105

Does anyone think privacy of any real sort is maintainable going forward? Machine learning algorithms are learning to identify people just by their walk -- no face recognition required. Algorithms are moving toward being able to decipher text just by the audio of the keyboard being typed on. In short, given a gestalt of ALL public data and sufficiently advanced algorithms is there really a way for people to maintain…

Agreed, but also "privacy" is an abstraction that layers over the actual thing that people are worried about. Any answer to why do you care about hiding this information? can all be boiled down to the fear that "[person or group] might use [private data item] to create [bad outcome] for me." So the thing people actually care about is the risk of bad outcome, not the actual data itself. If your theory is correct, then…

Post by gnulinux » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:25 PM UTC

WendyTheWillow wrote: post #245

skummetmaelk wrote: post #6

This disaster is the perfect counter-argument to those always saying "why do you care so much about privacy. It doesn't affect you when I share things. You can just choose not to do it", except no, I can't choose when we're relatives and you chose to share our genome. It is so obvious that your relatives sharing their genomic data with 23andMe reveals a lot of information about you. We can only hope people will reali…

Please provide one concrete example where this leaked information was used to materially impact someone's life that would not have otherwise been possible without the leak. Absent that, the argument holds that screeching declarations about privacy tend to be overblown.