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23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

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Re: 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

#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 realize that this also holds true for collecting behavioural data on other people sharing the same background as you.

Re: 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

#7
Fun fact, they can sometimes narrow down crime scene DNA to just a single person by having enough partial matches from their (potentially distant) relatives. I can't remember which DNA database was used, but some cases were solved this way, IIRC it introduced a bunch of legal questions about if you can search a database in that way.

I think this was the article that talked about this (apologies for the paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/magazine/dna-test-crime-i...

Re: 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

#8
Something does not add up.

"23andMe said the data breach was caused by customers reusing passwords"

Yet 14,000 accounts were breached in one go? Where did these passwords come from? Maybe there was another related breach (something like lastpass can explain this)?

Also, using the "DNA Relatives" features the hackers were able to access personal information relating to 6.9 million individuals. That means each one of the original 14,000 accounts had about 492 unique relatives. What am I missing?

Re: 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

#10
I bet a lot of insurance risk adjusters will make an order for the data, optimize their models a bit, raise a few rates, and make a few new millionaires in the process.

I’m being snarky but isn’t it really scary that 2% of Americans could be impacted by something like that?

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