Doesn’t help that they immediately updated their user agreement to avoid responsibility. Nothing says give our product a chance like that.
I don’t trust them or anyone else with my data, let alone my DNA
Well someone’s not getting reborn 200M years from now in Cenozoic Park.
Dun dun! Dun duuun! Dun-da daaa da-dun dun daaaah! flails silly human arms RAAAH!!!
that stuff that you breathe out, slough off and leave literally every places youve ever been? yeah, need to keep that under wraps.
Except that leaving it somewhere is like a pseudonym. It would take a lot of effort to pinpoint to once specific person unless that person was already the sole target - then you just get a sample at their home.
Also, breathing out DNA?
It’s not necessary for the person to be the sole target.
By comparing the persons DNA to 2 or 3 relatives in a database, it’s quite easy to identify whose DNA you have, or at least narrow it down to a few potentials. (E.g. the DNA is from a male that is a cousin of X by the male line and nephew of Y by the female line).
all dna is interconnected as all humans are sourced from the same source dna. at some point, we will have enough dna in a database to be able to pinpoint almost any sample to anyone or their family closest in that dataset. it will eventually just be everyone. the set doesnt change, it will just grow as more people are added and its ‘accidentally’ released. its inevitable.
retrieving any humans dna you really want is fairly trivial. we need only minute traces anymore, and it gets less as amplification techniques improve. they already have molecular sniffing devices in all major airports. not for dna, but you get the idea.
ha, yes when you breathe you exhale a lot of particulate into the air, and guess what, its laden with your dna.
personally, i could not care less. have my dna, do what you will with it. oh noooes you have all of the numbers of me… whateverwillido?!
realistically, its only valuable in aggregate.
the only real concern ive ever heard was corporations making decisions on peoples dna, and that can be trivially circumvented by extending discrimination laws.
i care more about my amazon password leaking than anyone having my irrevocably unchangeable dna. why worry about it?
Refreshing to have some sort of consequences for being negligent with people’s data
Which data were they negligent with? I thought it was breaches on other sites that gave reused passwords.
Credential stuffing is a well understood part of the threat landscape that 23 and me negligently failed to account for, allowing hackers to access 7 million people’s info after hacking only 14 thousand users.
…because those 7 million people opted into sharing their data with everyone else.
There are still all kinds of things a company can do to mitigate at least some of this. New browser, new location, forced two-factor auth, etc.
But hey, at least they got to expose their Jewish customers to Nazis before they went under…
