Comment by ttmrichter@lemmy.world on Annual reminder: 23andMe is a dangerous Christmas gift that could have unforeseen impacts on your entire family, your children, etc.

My first reaction on seeing 23andMe and its workalikes was “why the flying fuck would I want to give my DNA information to a corporate entity in this world of ubiquitous corporate surveillance!?”

It’s nice to have cynicism vindicated. Again.

If someone made a chip that read dna and had an open source program to load on a raspberry pi, with no telemetry or creepy stuff, I would pay a LOT

You wouldn’t pay as much as 23andMe would pay to kill it, hence the problem with our current system.

I’m fine with some company that has a lock-tight privacy policy in place. Even better if they just send me the results and keep no database. But that’s not what they do. They send it all to the government, and then charge you upsell fees in the form of a subscription to see the same information that they shared with the government without your consent. Okay… You probably gave consent in the 5000 page ToS that you didn’t read, but that’s an argument for a different day.

Has literally decades of corporate interests revealing they don’t know how to secure things not taught you any kind of a lesson?

I don’t want a corporate entity of any kind to have my DNA info on file. They’re all clowns, or, rather, if they’re not clowns now they will be after a single bad quarter when they decide to cut their security team in half.

I did say that it’s better if they have no database…

I don’t understand the unforeseen ramifications he’s talking about for your entire family. I understand the main fear about uncertainty regarding what happens to the data, which is likely sold to the pharmaceutical sector or Institutions. However, what’s the point? I don’t support such companies, but it seems like there’s a lot of fearmongering without much substance. It’s not that different from an ISP or any company collecting data to sell to other companies or institutions. No one expected anything different, and those who did are likely just consumers who don’t care about these issues at the end of the day.

It’s not that different from an ISP or any company collecting data to sell to other companies or institutions.

“It’s not that different from this thing that’s done that’s already proven time and again to be an utter shitshow, so we should permit this new thing too!”

I’m beginning to see how COVID-19 killed a million Americans. “It’s not that different from the flu, so we shouldn’t worry.”

Whoa, lol. I never said whatever you’re paraphrasing. My question is, what are these unforeseeable ramifications the author is talking about? My point is, none of these things are surprising, unforeseeable, or unexpected. Did we expect anything different from these companies? No one I know did.

I’m not debating if data collection and selling is ethical. My question again is, what are these unforeseeable ramifications? Everything he’s telling me is very well known to the public and quite foreseeable. In other words, am I missing something?

Yes. You’re missing the definition of “unforeseen”.

Let’s do a thought experiment together. Picture these steps happening:

Everybody has signed up with a corporate DNA registry, or is related to someone who has. (I mean what could possibly go wrong? We know what is possible with genetic information and what isn’t right?)
Advances in genetic technology let the tech do something that was previously “impossible”. Like, say, identify anybody who has the markers for, say, Aztec ancestry. If you’ve got more than 10% Aztec blood you’re spotted by this new tech.
A Nazi-adjacent president is elected on a platform of fearing the hordes of Mexicans at the USA’s southern border. (That would never happen, though, right? /s)
The government commandeers the genetic database and gets a list of people with that marker. (And probably others, since, you know, it’s highly unlikely that they’d figure out the markers for one group and only one, right?)
Kristallnacht Part Dos starts.

This is all a flight of fancy, of course. Nobody would think of that chain happening. (Which is what “unforeseen” means. It was not foreseen.) That chain or potentially a million other chains that lead to horrific ends. All because we did not foresee just how dangerous handing out genetic information willy-nilly would be.

Other possible chain ends include:

that data falling into the hands of terrorists who use that same advance in genetic technology to identify targets
that data falling into the hands of ~~terrorists~~medical businesses who use information about disease tendencies to deny coverage
that data falling into the hands of government who use that information to identify and eliminate trans people
…

Well you get the idea. While there’s a lot of good coming from this technology (which is why we can’t really ban it entirely), the prospective unforeseen outcomes that lead down the path of horror and despotism means we should not be just handing that shit around and trading it like baseball cards.

Oh, thank you for the explanations! However, all you’ve described is the misuse of this data, and my point is that it is not unforeseeable that data (whatever data it may be) gets misused, stolen, or sold. All your examples are just describing the same thing - misuse of data. Arguing that ethical cleansing based on misused data from a for-profit organization is a bit far-fetched as an article headline if he ment that). If it comes to a point where ethical clashing is on the menu, it will happen regardless of the existence of DNA data.

All these unforeseeable events seem quite far-fetched.

I understand if the argument was that under very specific circumstances, DNA data can be misused to identify people who might not want to be found, such as through family members who sequenced their genome, especially if the family members are in contact with or have any information regarding the target.

Or, if the argument was similar to the gun argument, like in the last paragraph you wrote, stating that it is a tool that can be misused, and now we must decide whether it is worth using as we do today and how we want to regulate it. The tool is not the problem; some humans are.

But none of the examples are truly applicable to our reality today. The regulation and control of these entities and datasets is an important question, but I think there are better ways to discuss it than the strategy the author chose.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, instead of concocting convoluted theories about potential outcomes, we should focus on the core issue, not just the symptoms. This article ignites wild theories about possible scenarios, rather than addressing the problem of our inability to effectively regulate companies and corporate entities. The issue remains unsolved even if these DNA companies cease to exist, but they certainly highlight the fundamental problem of somewhat unregulated data markets.

Just for clarification - my comparison was between the business models of an ISP and a DNA company - having a primary product sold to the consumer which is then used to collect and accumulate data, and subsequently making money by selling this data. It was not my intention to “rate” or value them against each other or to trivialize one. This business model is well-known and should not be unexpected from a company in today’s data-driven economy.

The words after “company” in your final sentence are the problem.

There are examples in there. Police grab data off of a random crime scene, then they generate a pic out of that data. They start looking for a culprit.

Now imagine “the black sheep” of the family, a crackhead cousin or a criminal, steals something and kills someone. Police get in, get a swab, and create a portrait that looks exactly like you. Or better yet, they find matches of the DNA and trace it back to you - who went for the service. Suddenly you are in deep shit and need to prove your innocence. Also imagine you are a public figure - a local polititian, headmaster of the school, whatever. Suddenly you hit the news, and everyone “judges” you to be guilty. Media spread it around, you lose your job.

Even with a full DNA sequence, recreating it (how even?) and placing it at a crime scene without police or lab involvement is highly complex and unlikely. Using hairs or other physical evidence is more feasible for framing someone?

Bro, nah, that’s borderline Black Mirror writing. It’s possible something like that might happen, but let’s be real, the chance of it happening to a person is almost zero. Even if you’re a public figure - because if that’s happening, someone wants to sabotage you whether they have some DNA information from you or not. And sloppy police work is sloppy police work, no matter what tools might be used or not. I get the privacy concerns and the not knowing part. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a for-profit data accumulation company, that will sell to anyone with the right money. Sure, some data might be misused to frame someone, or by regimes or institutions and, of course, by other for-profit companies to create products. But that’s neither unexpected nor surprising.

I don’t understand the unforeseen ramifications he’s talking about

That’s the way ‘unforeseen’ tends to work.

Oh, okay, thank you. So, that’s it? Just clickbait? - edit: By that, I mean the title could mean something like he found something unexpected or unforeseen and therefore wrote this article with this headline. Or, it could mean nothing if there’s nothing unforeseen or unexpected written about in the article, which I call clickbait here.

No one expected anything different

Pretty much everyone, all of society, expected something different. That’s why people were so loose with what they gave away, before it became known how insidious the tracking and violation of implicit trust was. That’s why we’re just now getting legislation into place, 30 years after Google started gobbling up everyone’s data. Nobody expected how pervasive the spying would become.

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