Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 426 posts

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#131

Post by johnisgood »

silisili wrote: post #69
goosejuice wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every customer that legitimately wants their data deleted there's a hundred that complain their data is gone after confirming deletion. The same customers that mark your transactional email as spam then complain about not being able to get into their account. Exaggerating here, but I do think soft deletion practices can be partially blamed on real business problems. I'm not sure why anyone would think that using…

I get that a little from the company perspective, but it leads to its own issues of perhaps more important magnitude. If you have data for a user, who wants to delete it, you can soft delete to allow recovery to prevent complaints. On the other hand, 5 years from now your system gets hacked, and now you have to email some person you haven't done business with in 5 years to tell them their data that you claimed was de…

Why not educate the customer? "If you request deletion, do not expect your data back, because it truly will be deleted!". Sad state of world that this has to be said, however.

Discord (and many other places) allow you to recover your account within a specific period of time, but they do not delete anything, you just simply lose access and your name gets changed (and avatar and status removed), but all your DMs are there, all your messages are there (although I understand why, especially in servers (guilds)).

There is a way to bulk save and delete messages from Discord, however.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#132

Post by ascorbic »

leakyfilter wrote: post #93
dtquad wrote: post #90

Can some billionaire please buy 23andMe's corpse and delete all data and physical samples they have? Even if you have never used 23andMe several people you are related to already have so they have a partial genetic profile of you.

Why should it matter? They can't link it to me since they don't have my genetic profile.

If they have enough of your relatives then yes they absolutely can.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#134

Post by raverbashing »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #89
raverbashing wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could actually be a plot point on a dystopian sci-fi movie (identifying people by weird metrics like toe size and such)

That sort of thing is already in widespread usage. For example palm geometry readers as a biometric factor to go along with a key card at a building entrance. Although in the future I imagine it's more likely to be things like arm to torso ratio or gait recognition or similar, done via machine vision.

It's different

Biometric comparison is commonplace, once you give your biometric info

What I'm saying is that people would be id'd by a biometric measure derived from a genetic measure

(and yes of course I watched Gattaca already)

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#135

Post by johnisgood »

al_borland wrote: post #119
msie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, soft deletion has saved many people's bacon.

That doesn’t mean soft delete should be the only option. With some of our processes, we soft delete for a period of time (2-4 weeks) to account for mistakes. Then, if on one tries to recover it after that time, it does the actual delete. This seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It offers a safety net, while still getting the job done. With as many data breaches as we see these days, I want my data gone. If some…

The AT&T leak was huge. :D There was also a leak in either 23andMe or some other company handling DNAs not too long ago (months, maybe 2 years >.>).

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#137

Post by [deleted] »

Quekid5 wrote: post #59
Unroasted6154 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It possible with crypto shredding. You store everything encrypted with one key by customer. When you want to delete you erase the key. The data becomes unusable everywhere (backups included). Then a job periodically garbage collects data without a key, but that's more for cost saving. Big companies do this but it requires some technical maturity. If you operate in Europe you have to implement proper data deletion. I…

You still have to backup those keys somewhere... and if you don't do it the same way as for the data then your backups are effectively worthless.

[deleted]

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#138

Post by b800h »

Well I'd downloaded our family genomes a while back, and had been attempting to get 23andme to respond in what I consider to be a proper way to GDPR disclosure requests. I've now just used their internal tool to delete our data.

I suppose that I'm fortunate to live in an area covered by GDPR and fairly strong medical data regulations.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#139

Post by zmgsabst »

goosejuice wrote: post #65
silisili wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absurd to me how soft deletion took over the entire industry and 'DELETE FROM' became taboo.

For every customer that legitimately wants their data deleted there's a hundred that complain their data is gone after confirming deletion. The same customers that mark your transactional email as spam then complain about not being able to get into their account. Exaggerating here, but I do think soft deletion practices can be partially blamed on real business problems. I'm not sure why anyone would think that using…

A few reasons:

- you have legal obligations no matter what the customer wants, eg, Amazon and storing transactions for tax reasons

- you do actively delete most of their data, eg profiles, but “deleted=true” on their central account record is needed to propagate the deletion to other systems, eg, customer analytics

- you tombstone it for efficiency reasons and only periodically delete the records as part of your checkpoint/backup procedure; similarly CDN deployments

- you delete all the live copies, but tell customers “retained up to 90 days” because you need backups to age out

I’m not saying companies are all innocent — but there are some legitimate reasons that deletions aren’t fully instant.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#140

Post by brikym »

midtake wrote: post #107
ks2048 wrote: post #35

There are troubling privacy issues, but it was able to tell me: "Toe Length Ratio : Likely second toe longer". I didn't even have to look down! Maybe it was a bad idea. But, I figured if we enter a dystopian future, evil health care companies or governments could easily get my DNA if they want to and/or simply require that information to get care. When you get blood drawn, do you see what they do with it? Hopefully,…

> But, I figured if we enter a dystopian future, evil health care companies or governments could easily get my DNA if they want to and/or simply require that information to get care. Yes, because you gave it to them. Nihilism undermines any sort of resistance movement against evil.

No he didn't but his overly curious aunt Janice gave it to them.
Post reply on HN