What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

I've had better luck with relative finder as well. My very first contact was able to trace his great-great-grandparents roots to a village that is only 30 minutes away or so from my Dad's ancestor's town. This person is marked as a 5th cousin, so I'd consider that pretty compelling.

Regarding your "mostly seem not to be cousins" comment, I think people have an overly narrow definition of cousins where 23andme has a much more strict genetic definition. If you look at their FAQ, they claim that it's fairly accurate that if someone is marked as a relative, that's a relative. The degree of relation may be off by a generation or two, but it's there.

I find it interesting how many people, even those who sign up for the service and enable visibility on relative finder, heck, even those who fill out their profiles with surnames and extra information, either don't respond to contact requests or entirely dismiss relations dubbed by the system "likely 3rd cousin" as "impossible".

At the 6th, 5th, and even 4th cousin levels, especially going into the past with typically large families, we are talking about fairly large networks of people. I see a lot of folks say things like "I can trace my roots back 10 generations", when they really just mean one single paternal line, for example. How can you be sure that someone didn't jump in the hay with someone else in secret that one summer in 1807, or that some forgotten sister of a great-great-grandparent went off to America for 5 years before returning to her homeland, etc? With such large numbers of people, the likeliness of having huge numbers of cousins goes way up.

For example, look how many hops it takes to get to your 4th cousin:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4th+cousin

Can we all vouch for all the surnames, brothers and sisters, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc in a relation even as "close" as this?

I wonder if your famous relative regrets putting his genome on 23andMe.

Actually, I got mine shipped to Turkey and they also included a pre-paid shipping label to the package.

One simple immediate consequence may be that you cannot answer a question like "do you have any reason to believe that you may be at risk for XYZ" anymore without potentially having to rely on a result that may or may not have statistical significance -- or which you may have misunderstood. A lot of 23andme reports are in the form of "if you are east asian and have the following genotype for SNP rsXXXXXX, you have a 3% chance of developing condition XYZ". Personal genomics services like 23andme are going out there and saying that SNPs are pretty reliable, but the reality for some conditions and traits may still be fuzzy as more data comes in. There may be as-yet undiscovered SNPs that have a bigger effect on your cancer risk than the ones their v3 chip happens to cover, for example, and just having a 1 or even a dozen SNPs may not be enough for a clear picture. On the other hand, an insurance company might find it risky enough to deny you coverage. Nobody knows how that will shake out.

In the future, if a given insurance provider knows you have purchased a service like this, they also can then figure out which SNPs you know your genotypes for (it would be fairly trivial for any insurance company to find out which 950,000 or so SNPs 23andme tests for), and can then craft a survey form asking about these specific traits.

Many people will likely still try the service anyway because they'd rather know, pro-actively address certain issues, and risk the insurance game, than not know at all.

[EDIT: Apologies for not having read your question all that clearly. Just assume the above applies to "admitting you've used the service in public"]