251–260 of 402 posts
For those who do not know, her sister is a longtime Google marketing person since 1999, who worked on AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, GoogleAnalytics and the money-losing data collection and advertising subsidiary YouTube.
It seems personal data collection for profit runs in the family.
If capitalism is so great why is it so incompatible with being a good and honest person?
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This looks like a perfect class action case. There's really no physical harm or financial harm to the users, but a class action might be the only way for it to hurt. But IANAL, and probably have it all wrong in my head???
Why is it that in the US individuals have to band together and privately launch a class action to stop these types of parasitic behaviours. The government is supposed to represent the interests of citizens.
I'm not sure that's ever happened in this country. They pay all sorts of lip service, but when challenged or under pressure, the US makes a lot of excuses for leaving its own people behind.
Thankfully we can repay that favor and see how they like it when there's nobody left to defend them.
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Why is it that in the US individuals have to band together and privately launch a class action to stop these types of parasitic behaviours. The government is supposed to represent the interests of citizens.
That's exactly why - we have a largely dysfunctional federal government (and most state governments aren't much better). The biggest downside is the lawyers take a massive chunk of any award and the actual victims are often left with very little. Or, even worse, the victims get worthless coupons (like with many credit/PII breaches - the award will be 1-year of credit monitoring from the company that allowed the breac…
I told them that I will certainly not start to build a credit score at 40 yo so they will have to find someone else.
I'm getting to a point where I automatically assume any business is both taking my money and trying to totally fuck other parts of my life behind my back to make more money. If capitalism is so great why is it so incompatible with being a good and honest person?
Capitalism was never about that. It was about having acting in their own self-interest as to maximize economic efficiency. That model works great when you are selling commodities and physical products.
Capitalism in the era of personal information as currency is a entirely different beast that needs to be reworked.
Thanks for sharing. Will def opt out and roll into the class action suits already filed. Take security seriously people. Especially when dealing with super sensitive data.
Why did you send them your DNA? It was pretty obvious from day 1 that sending some random startup on the internet my DNA was a bad move.
The social aspect of other people at Google doing it made it feel normal.
In hindsight, I drank the Google kool-aid in more ways then one.
The sentiment of distrust towards tech companies and tech companies being yet-another-corporation is really only obvious in recent years. It wasn't the case a decade ago when we were busy being judgemental of Wall Street. Ironically, now it seems that Wall Street is more trustworthy because, at the very least, they are forthrite about their motive to make profit instead of all these lies about "changing the world".
I would have presumed that security-minded people, which includes those who work in tech, would not so easily give away their genome, and that most of 23andMe's customers are a slice of the general population. But then I read about things like WorldCoin and that people who go to startup parties jump at the chance to give away scans of their retinas and I'm befuddled. Why would anyone willingly do that?
I'm familiar with security (I keep a copy of Applied Cryptography on my shelf for "fun reading") and tech, here's a copy of my whole genome: https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C Note it's a full human genome, far more data than a 23&Me report. You can download the data yourself and try to find risk factors (at the time, the genetic counsellors were surprised to find that I had no credible genetic risk factors). Pl…
I think actuaries will care an awful lot about this data and could use it to negatively influence your risk factor, and thus insurance premiums.
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I'm familiar with security (I keep a copy of Applied Cryptography on my shelf for "fun reading") and tech, here's a copy of my whole genome: https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C Note it's a full human genome, far more data than a 23&Me report. You can download the data yourself and try to find risk factors (at the time, the genetic counsellors were surprised to find that I had no credible genetic risk factors). Pl…
Fully agree with you here. I can understand why people argue "We must do everything possible that no human being ever finds out anything medical-related about another human being, ever" But that is a value judgement, and I believe it is one that comes at a great cost to society- I wouldn't be surprised if >50% of the cost of medical care is directly or indirectly due to this attitude, and that medical progress has be…
There's the old saying of knowledge being power. If you want this information about people being spread, then you're advocating having power over these people over that information.
It takes very little imagination to see how humans would misuse this data.
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That's not the same risk because 23andme also has name, address, email. One risk if you have PII+genome is that a technically sophisticated entity can determine if you've physically been in a location. Also with an extensive PII+genome database they could find your family, for example for blackmail purposes. Another risk is that a health insurance provider could deny you based on potential health issues they find in…
Yes, but technically sophisticated entities can also use methods that require less effort. https://xkcd.com/538/