191–200 of 426 posts
I'm certain i read about it from HN but i can't find any reference to that new anymore.
Some billionaire should be an absolute hero: buy this thing and just shut it down. Delete all the data. Salt the earth. Move on.
Not how billionaires work.
That's what we would do if we were billionaires.
And that's precisely why we're not billionaires.
I'm happy with my choices, though. They're merely confident and callous, but happiness will ever elude them.
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.
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 en…
This is unfortunate news for anyone whose data is now one of the assets to be sold to the highest bidder.
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.
But meet your new Big Brother!
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This exact scenario happened to my wife. Grew up thinking her dad was her dad and that she was of some certain ancestry. I remember her and I both spitting into a tube in our SF apartment in San Francisco in 2012 and mailing them off. A few years later, we look at the ancestry data and there is a big surprise (she was ~50% something that she was sure 0% before that). Turns out her dad wasn’t her dad and she was donor…
How did this impact her relationship with her dad?
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…