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23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

reuters.com

181–190 of 426 posts

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#181

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…

> I'm not sure why anyone would think that using soft deletion on an actual burn account function would be sensible though.

When the data has value to the company and it is legal to keep it it seems very sensible to keep it (out of the perspective of s.o. acting in the interest of the company).

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your genome can be scavenged from the air. It is not information we are capable of keeping private.

But can it be isolated from the myriad of life floating around? I doubt that specificity would be economically profitable. The police did catch the Golden State Killer by scavenging a used coffee cup or somesuch, however.

Often it can. And even in cases where currently it can't the technology will improve, costs will come down.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#183

As an aside I actually regret signing up for 23andMe, not because this isn't a great idea but more because I find the idea that the future having copies of your DNA around we might end up in some weird sci-fi universe where people can be specifically targeted with viruses or profiled in some other way. Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen but it feels like an invasion of privacy having such perso…

As we constantly leave bits of our DNA around the environment, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for an unscrupulous company to just collect DNA for nefarious purposes. I'd guess that they'd need the DNA linked to a person for it to be worthwhile, so maybe an easy collection device would be to send out a return addresses envelope for entering a prize draw or something, and then collect the saliva used to seal the envelope (i.e. not a self-sealing one, but one that you have to wet/lick).

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#184

As an aside I actually regret signing up for 23andMe, not because this isn't a great idea but more because I find the idea that the future having copies of your DNA around we might end up in some weird sci-fi universe where people can be specifically targeted with viruses or profiled in some other way. Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen but it feels like an invasion of privacy having such perso…

Download your raw data. You have to request it from them so people should do that asap

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#185
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it's always seemed completely insane to me that people signed up for these services. Possible Pros: You find out you are 20% Norwegian! Fun! Possible Cons: Grandma is going to prison for an unsolved crime. Assume a non-threatening position and comply with all orders of the new Department of Racial Purity. Also, that's not your real Dad.

I should have access to the data about me, it shouldn't be for sale ever. It's gross that we have access to this technology but only if we give away all our rights to a company even for a paid service. The murder one is a little more nuanced but ideally it should be a legal matter where it can only be used with a warrant or your explicit single time consent and not buried in a TOS. If you don't want to help the polic…

The murder one scares me. The police and legal system are way to comfortable with using DNA evidence, not understanding the insecurities of it.

Danish police had to reopen over 12,000 cases where DNA evidence was used and redo everything because neither the police nor the judges understood that the tests used an insufficient numbers of DNA markers to uniquely identify a person. Most of the incorrectly identified people was exactly innocent, but people went to jail over drug charges that should have been a warning or a fine.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#186

Even if you haven't personally used their service, if any close relatives have, they already have a sizable amount of information on your genome. They maintain the equivalent of "shadow profiles" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile ) as part of their data model for "ancestry" modeling purposes - for example inferring a paternal haplogroup based on data uploaded by genetic relatives. I can only hope at the…

I am not as worried if this data gets out or not.

I think there are negative externalities if the data is sold to insurance firms — who can use the genomic information in litigation and policy rejections — or if the data is sold to some sort of powerful, pro-eugenics political organization. The insurance externalities likely can be mitigated with minimal legislation (protecting consumers in a similar manner to how we protect those with pre-existing conditions) and it is reasonable to assume pro-eugenics political groups wouldn’t be any less dangerous without this genomic data available.

Thus, I struggle to see how this data changing hands would be especially detrimental to society. One could contend a moral dilemma will arise from future developments in cloning, but would it? We already have clones in the form of identical twins, and their existence does not seem to create many, if any, especially problematic moral dilemmas. Maybe people are worried that society will start cloning celebrities and famous intellectuals instead of having babies more naturally — creating a world of designer babies where the diversity of thought and talent shrinks in a “tragedy of the commons”-esque dilemma — but I don’t think this is people’s issue because most people frame their qualms as more of a personal privacy issue. Moreover, designer babies issue I describe would likely become an issue with or without cloning.

There are issues that come to mind regarding genomics in commerce — such as the ethics and market incentives of patenting certain genomic patterns — but again I don’t see how this 23andMe data changing hands make this issue any more pressing than before.

On the other hand, my instinct (which I have learned to never blindly trust) is that making the data more widely available may make it cheaper and easier for researchers to make impactful discoveries. Therefore, my biggest worry with the change of ownership is that the new owners may keep the data behind a bigger wall.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#188

As an aside I actually regret signing up for 23andMe, not because this isn't a great idea but more because I find the idea that the future having copies of your DNA around we might end up in some weird sci-fi universe where people can be specifically targeted with viruses or profiled in some other way. Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen but it feels like an invasion of privacy having such perso…

There was a US government entity (can’t remember which one) post on here a couple days ago warning that 23&me was about to file and showing how to delete your data and opt out of ever selling it to anyone. Look it up on hn.algolia.com there weren’t very many steps.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can it be isolated from the myriad of life floating around? I doubt that specificity would be economically profitable. The police did catch the Golden State Killer by scavenging a used coffee cup or somesuch, however.

Often it can. And even in cases where currently it can't the technology will improve, costs will come down.

Yeah, eventually, but it may be a while.

Re: 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

#190

As an aside I actually regret signing up for 23andMe, not because this isn't a great idea but more because I find the idea that the future having copies of your DNA around we might end up in some weird sci-fi universe where people can be specifically targeted with viruses or profiled in some other way. Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen but it feels like an invasion of privacy having such perso…

> Who knows who will buy all this data after bankruptcy... People who think having millions of people dna is worth something. I could think of company working with private investigators or even governments. Your dna sample is part of 23andMe valuation right now, I wouldn’t have hope even if it says your data is removed on their website, there are still backup.

Or health insurers looking for markers of disease / chronic illness
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