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23andMe's Fall
191–200 of 282 posts
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#192This is a damning indictment of Wojcicki's management of the company. Failed execution on the drug development strategy over 10+ years, lying about growth, pushing out the cofounder, never making a profit, hack that went undiscovered for months ... about the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite. If she can't convince her family, fri…
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Re: 23andMe's Fall
#193Did they kept the kits sent in? Thus still sitting on many DNA samples. The storage costs money but the data is probably worth it. Not sure who to ask?
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#194This is a damning indictment of Wojcicki's management of the company. Failed execution on the drug development strategy over 10+ years, lying about growth, pushing out the cofounder, never making a profit, hack that went undiscovered for months ... about the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite. If she can't convince her family, fri…
I want to learn the secret dark arts of VC capital raise on lies. I don't need the money but more for the hacking.
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#195This is a damning indictment of Wojcicki's management of the company. Failed execution on the drug development strategy over 10+ years, lying about growth, pushing out the cofounder, never making a profit, hack that went undiscovered for months ... about the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite. If she can't convince her family, fri…
If they go bankrupt they should destroy all the data but of course they will rather sell it to recover at least a bit of money.
I would expect that you have a right to get your data deleted.
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illegal for health insurance companies. But not so for life insurance, or disability insurance or long-term care.
If they wanted to use that information for underwriting they'd just make getting a genetic test a prereq before underwriting the policy.
And if they wanted easy cash they'd "just" make you pay $500 as a signup fee.
Which is to say: No they wouldn't just do that, it would cut their business too much despite being a way to make more money per client.
But getting it from a company that already has it avoids that downside.
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, nobody is really interested in the test to find out they have G at SNP 12213244243 either. They do it specifically to get the ancestry, health, and potential physical bias type information you mention - that's the only real data anyone is talking about when referencing the test. Plenty of companies would love to have that kind of data to target users with. The real killer would probably be around how useless he…
That's kind of what I mean by it not being worth much though. Sure, leaks are embarrassing - the most common issue here is finding out that your dad isn't your real dad. But it's not useful for evil purposes because it's not /accurate/. It doesn't reveal all that much real additional information about your ancestry and health! Since it's decided before you're born: 1. its effects are mostly already expressed and peop…
> But it's not useful for evil purposes because it's not /accurate/. It doesn't reveal all that much real additional information about your ancestry and health!
I'm not actually convinced that accuracy is all that important to the value of personal data. Or perhaps I should say I don't think think there's an accuracy floor at which the value drops to $0.
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
My suspicion has always been that this sort of data–common SNPs from all comers and no specific phenotype collection–is not very useful for any sort of drug design. And if it is, publicly available data will be just as good as 23andMe's larger amount. It was a bet worth trying, IMHO, but always a risky bet. And with bio, you don't find out if your bets work for a decade or more, because the iteration cycle is 10x slo…
My suspicion has been that SNP array data is not that useful for drug discovery. They’re targeting the most common/variable SNPs, which I suspect don’t have a large health effect (except for maybe late in life, otherwise how would they get passed down). I would suspect the more valuable targets would be rarer, or arise de novo (as is common in cancer, eg driver mutations).
You’re right that rarer SNPs have big effect sizes. However the problem is that they’re rare so you don’t make much money treating ppl with rare diseases.
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they file for bankruptcy, they cannot legally destroy the data. The data is a salable asset, the law requires them to preserve it so that it can be sold and the money returned to creditors. And many of the promises they have given about it's use can and will be broken by the trustees dissolving the company. The thing you need to consider when you give data to a company is not "will these people misuse this", but "…
This makes me wonder if there could be strong enough laws around protecting genetic info (for example penalties that pierce the corporate veil) that those with fiduciary responsibility to the company could argue that destroying the data is really in the shareholders' best interest. I'm completely uninformed in this area. Is there precedent for anything like this in the modern day?
Upgrade this to any medically adjacent data. ALL of the DNA data should be covered under HIPPA or something similar.
Re: 23andMe's Fall
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they go bankrupt they should destroy all the data but of course they will rather sell it to recover at least a bit of money.
Remember that it's good opsec to rotate your genome every six months.
Also you have to have a genome with at least one uppercase, one lowercase, one number and one special character that isn’t \/‘` or ”