4 ms·

Your comment made me go back to articles on data sharing 23andme does with companies. At first I read your statement about cilantro but it seems these are just

Your comment made me go back to articles on data sharing 23andme does with companies. At first I read your statement about cilantro but it seems these are just the type of questions companies are paying big money for. >For now, though, 23andMe’s biobank is the world’s largest repository of DNA samples that also contains extensive health information, willingly provided by customers who answer survey questions like “Do you like cilantro?” and “Have you ever had cancer?” 23andMe says its customers supply it with as many as two million new facts each week. There’s only one problem—depending on your own ethics—and that is your data is helping pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs. The continuation from the above quote: >These surveys are proving valuable to drug investigators. This year the company found genetic variations strongly linked to whether customers consider themselves early risers, offering a clue about how to develop drugs that modulate alertness. [1] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601506/23andme-sells-data-for-drug-search/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601506/23andme-sells-data...

occamschainsaw 8y ago
That article was pretty helpful. Now I am entering the rabbit hole of reading about 23andme data sharing. What strikes me as interesting is their current business model: customers are paying them and answering their survey questions. That is quite brilliant, they get specifics about the people in their existing dataset, and once a critical statistical mass has been reached, they can find correlations between traits and genomic data. I would be happy to voluntarily provide my time, effort and data towards medical research. While I don't have ethical problems right now (I don't expect a lot of privacy anyways), there is a small nagging fear that these things could bite me 20 years down the line when these genomic tests are much more sophisticated and I have already given them my genome. Small benign hypothetical example: I start seeing ads about cilantro on Facebook. That fear was overpowered by my curiosity to learn about my genome. That's on me.

occamschainsaw 8y ago

That article was pretty helpful. Now I am entering the rabbit hole of reading about 23andme data sharing. What strikes me as interesting is their current business model: customers are paying them and answering their survey questions. That is quite brilliant, they get specifics about the people in their existing dataset, and once a critical statistical mass has been reached, they can find correlations between traits and genomic data. I would be happy to voluntarily provide my time, effort and data towards medical research. While I don't have ethical problems right now (I don't expect a lot of privacy anyways), there is a small nagging fear that these things could bite me 20 years down the line when these genomic tests are much more sophisticated and I have already given them my genome. Small benign hypothetical example: I start seeing ads about cilantro on Facebook. That fear was overpowered by my curiosity to learn about my genome. That's on me.