I didn't get the choice when my easily fooled parents decided it was a good idea.

We tried the 'delete your 23 and me data' but who the fuck knows if that works.

Now some corpos own my DNA probably.

Thanks mom.

You're probably affected by this even if you didn't participate.

The thing about genetics is you can make reasonable predictions about individuals if you have data on their relatives. Heck, you can reasonably make regional predictions with genetic data that will be fairly accurate.

If any of your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc took this test, then you are now at least a little exposed.

By 2008 we were well into the "you should know better than give up personal data" era. That is no excuse. People are just stupid and don't care.

There were all sorts of publications telling people to protect their personal information, online and in the meat world by 2001, let alone 2008.

I don't want to victim blame, but going right into this with all the warnings seems pretty stupid to me.

Now what does suck, and horribly so, is that there should be nothing of value gained from that data: there should be laws against nearly everything they could use for corporate advantage, exploitation, identity, etc. With severe consequences.

That is the failure.

I only want to disagree about Facebook not monetizing private data in 2008.

My wife was in politics/campaign management. They were already selling fairly sophisticated targeted ads by then.

I was shocked/terrified by how well they were targeting and it wasn't even close to what they have today.

FUCK CORPORATIONS.

It's not about blaming the victims, but correctly identifying what caused the situation and give society at large a better chance of avoiding it from happening again. From not trusting magazines about how secure the new wondertech is, all the way to not reading and understanding the legal paper and agreements they've agreed to.

I don't believe people should be robbed of their agency - You even bring up many good reasons for using 23AM despite being aware of the potential privacy issues. Rather, people should have the information to make a concious choice.

The blame for the situation is with the company. The crucial choice was always in the hand of the users.

i feel saddened that people focus entirely on hindsight but take the current situation as inevitable result of the past, and regard it as unchangeable.

no, this does not have to be treated like any other capitalist asset. if there's a shred of belief that the privacy and dignity of us humans matters to us now in 2025, just get together and disown 23andme, nuke the data, and turn the page.

unfortunately we have to stick harder to the principle of capitalism than any crusader in the middle ages had to stick to the Bible... helpless powerful species

Siblings and first cousins.

Most likely the data 23andme already gathered is enough to narrow down just about anybody in the US.

I wonder if there was anything in the T&Cs that mentioned extrapolation of data leading to identifying genetic relatives and whether their consent was void on this basis. Or whether this could be grounds for interesting lawsuits from nonconsensual relatives being identifiable from the participants' data.

My aunt did this along with posting a bunch of family photos and falling for those quizzes that ask your pet's name or your childhood address. If you have one person like that the privacy of your entire family is compromised.

We told her back around 2010 not to do this kind of stuff, but she's somewhere between "If I have nothing to hide" and "what's the harm?". I hope she gets it now, but we don't talk to her often

I literally had an econ professor years ago who directly told us "do not take a genetics test". This was before the ACA

The reason was simple. It's information that once a private company gets a hold of it, they will use it to hurt you. Whether it's a drug company that learns you're predisposed to addiction, so better to give you it people around you nice temporary discounts on addictive meds, or an insurance company that learns you're predisposed to cancer, so better to look for ways to deny or drop coverage.

Once these companies know a little bit about your nature, they'll exploit any aspect possible to increase profits.

This was not a progressive/socialist econ professor. Just someone who knows how capitalism works.

In 30 years they're going to squirt genetically modified copies of you into corporate artificial uteruses and that's how they will meet their worker needs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo#Investigation

Yeah, I would advice against becoming a serial killer for starters.

Exactly, and you cannot hope to see any meaningful regulation out of the current government.

The company will just buy The Secret Service/Trump's Presidential Library a fleet of Rolls Royce and he'll intimidate congress into silence.

You don’t spend a quarter Bil without knowing what you’re doing. The company is involved in drug discovery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Pharmaceuticals

The VC and founders should be painlessly deboned.

Narrator:

They didn't.

Ever see Minority Report?

That, but without the psychics. Insurance companies use things called actuary tables to estimate risk. If they have your DNA, they could decide that, since you have markers for early onset Alzheimer's, they're going to charge you double for life insurance.

Law Enforcement could decide that, since you share some trait with other common criminals, you're more likely to do crime, and get warrants to surveil you more closely. Maybe you don't do crime, but you get pulled in for a crime in the neighborhood because you're the one with the highest crime DNA score, and that's enough to convict you. Maybe you get pulled over more often for going a little over the speed limit, because you're being watched more closely. Maybe they just decide you're so likely to do a crime, they imprison you proactively.

None of this is absurd; it's all been done before. The Nazis used to evaluate people by how big their skulls were - this is Eugenics on fucking steroids, backed by the smell of legitimacy because DNA. People have wrongly gone to prison and served entire sentences because of bad DNA testing, and it's still used.

This should worry you. It's not hypothetical, it's not a conspiracy theory - the potential for abuse of a database like this should concern everyone, liberal or conservative.

Like all those white supremicists who discovered they have black ancestors; only, now, all their little KKK friends know, too!