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This article seems like a breathless rant. He didn't even take the time to explain what I interpret to be the meaning of his incendiary title, which is that DNA

This article seems like a breathless rant. He didn't even take the time to explain what I interpret to be the meaning of his incendiary title, which is that DNA companies who get hacked should be dissolved, or punitively fined to the extent that they can no longer function. Because, of course, you can't literally kill a company. I don't support the death penalty for flesh and blood people, but I'd be fine with it for corporations in certain cases. I'm not sure I agree that it should always happen in the case of a hack; the risk of an intrusion can never be eliminated, only mitigated, so a blanket "off with their heads" rule for any hack seems rather blunt and unnecessary: you'd guillotine any theoretical responsible companies who happened to be targeted by determined actors. Case by case executions perhaps?

arp242 3y ago
One thing I'd very much like to see here is transparency. The author of this article seems to assume the worst. I don't know if that's a reasonable assumption, but "assumptions" is all we can go on right now. 23andme claims "re-used passwords". We just have to take them at their word for this. I don't think they're outright lying, but you can misrepresent things without strictly telling falsehoods. But if we take them at their word, there's a huge amount of nuance there too – are we talking about a large and advanced botnet or just ten IPs that accessed those millions of accounts? The first might be very hard to protect against, the second would raise a lot more eyebrows. What kind of security measures do they have? Things like that. Right now, all I can really do is ... shrug. Because I just don't have enough information to judge one way or the other. And it would improve security, because forced airing of your dirty laundry is a good motivation for going to the laundrette. In the end this would benefit everyone, including the companies themselves.
UncleEntity 3y ago
> ...or punitively fined to the extent that they can no longer function. In which case their IP (everyone's genetic data) goes on the auction block to pay the exorbitant fines. How could that possibly go wrong?

arp242 3y ago

One thing I'd very much like to see here is transparency. The author of this article seems to assume the worst. I don't know if that's a reasonable assumption, but "assumptions" is all we can go on right now. 23andme claims "re-used passwords". We just have to take them at their word for this. I don't think they're outright lying, but you can misrepresent things without strictly telling falsehoods. But if we take them at their word, there's a huge amount of nuance there too – are we talking about a large and advanced botnet or just ten IPs that accessed those millions of accounts? The first might be very hard to protect against, the second would raise a lot more eyebrows. What kind of security measures do they have? Things like that. Right now, all I can really do is ... shrug. Because I just don't have enough information to judge one way or the other. And it would improve security, because forced airing of your dirty laundry is a good motivation for going to the laundrette. In the end this would benefit everyone, including the companies themselves.

UncleEntity 3y ago

> ...or punitively fined to the extent that they can no longer function. In which case their IP (everyone's genetic data) goes on the auction block to pay the exorbitant fines. How could that possibly go wrong?