4 ms·

Ask HN: Would you trust an ancestry DNA test?

12 points by ahmaman 7y ago

Wonder if they really work and what are the risks with sharing my DNA with a private company. Any recommendations? EDIT: For some context, I am living in the EU.

iudqnolq 7y ago
I'd talk with your family. You might discover that one of them has already shared their information, in which case your losses are minimal, or you might find out that one of them values their shared DNA not ending up in a database highly. Either way, I don't think it should only be your decision. I'd also recommend you Google further. There are a multitude of companies in this space. 23&Me is the household name, but if you want more complex to interpret but more detailed data alternatives exist. What's right for you depends on your goals. Hereditary info? Medical?
- tehlike 7y ago
  This sounds nice in theory, and also points out to the privacy aspect from family tree pov,but in practice, it will be a futile exercise I'm afraid. I'm kind of lucky in that I'm not originally from us and all my family is elsewhere and not interested in ancestry tests. That said, I think I forgot to opt out from dna tests for my daughter's birth, so I'm probably already out of luck.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    If I were you - and of course I'm not - I'd figure out for sure who has your daughter's DNA. If there's no privacy penalty I'd always value knowing myself better.
koeng 7y ago
As someone in the biological field, I personally don’t trust ancestry DNA tests, but I’d be much more likely to trust full-genome sequencing rather than SNP sequencing. Plus, you can have a lot of fun with bioinformatics if you get full genome sequences from your family members.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  I have no knowledge about biology, but am interested in knowing more about myself. Is any of what you said something a motivated outsider could learn well enough to get and interpret their own results, and if so do you have any pointers?
  - ahmaman 7y ago
    I subscribe to this, would also be interested to hear more!
senectus1 7y ago
no I Don't trust that organisation as far as I can collectively toss them.
- ahmaman 7y ago
  What are in your opinion the worst case scenarios when it comes to sharing your DNA?
muzani 7y ago
Not much more than I'd trust a fortune teller. The results seem quite highly random even for siblings. It's more like a party trick to have fun with but not entirely inaccurate.
probinso 7y ago
Yes there are lots of risks. At an individual level: even if there is no governmental back door, the necessity for a warrant and the criteria to award one scales significantly based on who a person is investigating. If a warrant cannot be awarded against you specifically, lower criteria maybe awarded against relatives. Poor quality assurances could result in contamination of your sample. This is known to have happened in other countries for DNA material. Additionally, geans Express differently due to environmental pressures of an individual. Your DNA can provide information about your socioeconomic background and your upbringing. understanding the threat model of providing your DNA to a private company is important. On an societal level: DNA is a fingerprint, that at scale can be used to identify protected groups. Providing your DNA allows for scale analysis against known traits of you and your compadres. This enables all sorts of dangerous future sciences. Medical IRBs are usually tasked with specifying their direct application that requires access to medical material. This requirement helps to prevent against arbitrary and scaled surveillance of populations. The private companies are not held to the same standard. You are giving or selling them access to your current expressed genome set. Finally, a measure against good: private companies for which you give arbitrary data do not have to tell you the consequences of your shared data. There is nothing that requires the company to even do anything with your data. There is also nothing preventing the company from reselling or redistributed your data in many cases. If a company is purchased, terms of service may change from underneath your provided sample. You do not know the applications, nor do you know if there is any measurable benefit. I would only participate in a program like this if there was a hard specific benefit to my life, and if I was beyond the age of trivial legal in discretions and had no intention of having children.
- ahmaman 7y ago
  Would love to see a device that I can locally analyse the results without sharing the data to any company. On the other hand, the way I understood it, is that the more data available, the more accurate are the analysis results.
pel0 7y ago
Smarter Every Day made a pretty interesting video about 23&Me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EEmVfbKNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EEmVfbKNs. I'm not pro/anti 23&Me or anything but it brings an interesting perspective.
krageon 7y ago
You live in the EU and you propose exporting what is arguably your most personal data to a country that has notoriously lax safeguards and routinely hides those dark patterns behind lazy money-centric arguments. Ask yourself if you are okay with another party selling your sequenced DNA data to a party that you don't and can't know. If the answer is yes, then you can use them!
psv1 7y ago
I trust them in the sense that I've used 23andme and then shared that dataset across a few other similar services. The actual utility was questionable - it fell in the category of expensive info-tainment for me, but I might just be biased because there was nothing all that remarkable in my results.
hprotagonist 7y ago
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-marketplace-1.4980976 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-m... no, not really. Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis. Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies.
- dekhn 7y ago
  I read through the article and the argreement between the twins is about what you'd expect. Twins don't truly have identical genomes, and these are estimates, so there is going to be some variance around the estimated value. A few SNP differences can explain this.
RaceWon 7y ago
Risks: finding out that you have a high chance of developing a dreadful life altering and/or ending disease. What would you do then? That news would likely destroy your life. Personally I'm adopted; so my family medical history is a blank slate, and I'm delighted by that--no dark clouds on my horizon. In terms of your ancestry: you're probably human, just like me. Cheers!
buboard 7y ago
You have nothing to fear. You are already fingerprinted. Social networks have 6 degrees of separation. Genetic networks have 3. https://blog.23andme.com/news/make-that-three-degrees-of-separation/ https://blog.23andme.com/news/make-that-three-degrees-of-sep...
charliechang 7y ago
Regarding the second part of your question.. As a person who worked there, I can tell you they take the care of your dna much more seriously than other companies. They know that what's good for customers is good for business. The company has huge legal pull from on staff lawyers who keep the customers best interests at the forefront (to avoid even potential lawsuits). I'm not speaking from a pro-company stand point (as I mentioned, I work-ed there), but from someone who knows the details.

12 points by ahmaman 7y ago

Wonder if they really work and what are the risks with sharing my DNA with a private company. Any recommendations? EDIT: For some context, I am living in the EU.

iudqnolq 7y ago

I'd talk with your family. You might discover that one of them has already shared their information, in which case your losses are minimal, or you might find out that one of them values their shared DNA not ending up in a database highly. Either way, I don't think it should only be your decision. I'd also recommend you Google further. There are a multitude of companies in this space. 23&Me is the household name, but if you want more complex to interpret but more detailed data alternatives exist. What's right for you depends on your goals. Hereditary info? Medical?

tehlike 7y ago
This sounds nice in theory, and also points out to the privacy aspect from family tree pov,but in practice, it will be a futile exercise I'm afraid. I'm kind of lucky in that I'm not originally from us and all my family is elsewhere and not interested in ancestry tests. That said, I think I forgot to opt out from dna tests for my daughter's birth, so I'm probably already out of luck.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  If I were you - and of course I'm not - I'd figure out for sure who has your daughter's DNA. If there's no privacy penalty I'd always value knowing myself better.

koeng 7y ago

As someone in the biological field, I personally don’t trust ancestry DNA tests, but I’d be much more likely to trust full-genome sequencing rather than SNP sequencing. Plus, you can have a lot of fun with bioinformatics if you get full genome sequences from your family members.

iudqnolq 7y ago
I have no knowledge about biology, but am interested in knowing more about myself. Is any of what you said something a motivated outsider could learn well enough to get and interpret their own results, and if so do you have any pointers?
- ahmaman 7y ago
  I subscribe to this, would also be interested to hear more!

senectus1 7y ago

no I Don't trust that organisation as far as I can collectively toss them.

ahmaman 7y ago
What are in your opinion the worst case scenarios when it comes to sharing your DNA?

muzani 7y ago

Not much more than I'd trust a fortune teller. The results seem quite highly random even for siblings. It's more like a party trick to have fun with but not entirely inaccurate.

probinso 7y ago

Yes there are lots of risks. At an individual level: even if there is no governmental back door, the necessity for a warrant and the criteria to award one scales significantly based on who a person is investigating. If a warrant cannot be awarded against you specifically, lower criteria maybe awarded against relatives. Poor quality assurances could result in contamination of your sample. This is known to have happened in other countries for DNA material. Additionally, geans Express differently due to environmental pressures of an individual. Your DNA can provide information about your socioeconomic background and your upbringing. understanding the threat model of providing your DNA to a private company is important. On an societal level: DNA is a fingerprint, that at scale can be used to identify protected groups. Providing your DNA allows for scale analysis against known traits of you and your compadres. This enables all sorts of dangerous future sciences. Medical IRBs are usually tasked with specifying their direct application that requires access to medical material. This requirement helps to prevent against arbitrary and scaled surveillance of populations. The private companies are not held to the same standard. You are giving or selling them access to your current expressed genome set. Finally, a measure against good: private companies for which you give arbitrary data do not have to tell you the consequences of your shared data. There is nothing that requires the company to even do anything with your data. There is also nothing preventing the company from reselling or redistributed your data in many cases. If a company is purchased, terms of service may change from underneath your provided sample. You do not know the applications, nor do you know if there is any measurable benefit. I would only participate in a program like this if there was a hard specific benefit to my life, and if I was beyond the age of trivial legal in discretions and had no intention of having children.

ahmaman 7y ago
Would love to see a device that I can locally analyse the results without sharing the data to any company. On the other hand, the way I understood it, is that the more data available, the more accurate are the analysis results.

pel0 7y ago

Smarter Every Day made a pretty interesting video about 23&Me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EEmVfbKNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EEmVfbKNs. I'm not pro/anti 23&Me or anything but it brings an interesting perspective.

krageon 7y ago

You live in the EU and you propose exporting what is arguably your most personal data to a country that has notoriously lax safeguards and routinely hides those dark patterns behind lazy money-centric arguments. Ask yourself if you are okay with another party selling your sequenced DNA data to a party that you don't and can't know. If the answer is yes, then you can use them!

psv1 7y ago

I trust them in the sense that I've used 23andme and then shared that dataset across a few other similar services. The actual utility was questionable - it fell in the category of expensive info-tainment for me, but I might just be biased because there was nothing all that remarkable in my results.

hprotagonist 7y ago

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-marketplace-1.4980976 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-m... no, not really. Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis. Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies.

dekhn 7y ago
I read through the article and the argreement between the twins is about what you'd expect. Twins don't truly have identical genomes, and these are estimates, so there is going to be some variance around the estimated value. A few SNP differences can explain this.

RaceWon 7y ago

Risks: finding out that you have a high chance of developing a dreadful life altering and/or ending disease. What would you do then? That news would likely destroy your life. Personally I'm adopted; so my family medical history is a blank slate, and I'm delighted by that--no dark clouds on my horizon. In terms of your ancestry: you're probably human, just like me. Cheers!

buboard 7y ago

You have nothing to fear. You are already fingerprinted. Social networks have 6 degrees of separation. Genetic networks have 3. https://blog.23andme.com/news/make-that-three-degrees-of-separation/ https://blog.23andme.com/news/make-that-three-degrees-of-sep...

charliechang 7y ago

Regarding the second part of your question.. As a person who worked there, I can tell you they take the care of your dna much more seriously than other companies. They know that what's good for customers is good for business. The company has huge legal pull from on staff lawyers who keep the customers best interests at the forefront (to avoid even potential lawsuits). I'm not speaking from a pro-company stand point (as I mentioned, I work-ed there), but from someone who knows the details.