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23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself
- uptownfunk 2y agoThey really shit the bed on what was probably one of the greatest things in a decade.
- theogravity 2y agoJust deleted my data. Who knows who will own it after this?
- nielsbot 2y agoStill waiting for my "deletion confirmation e-mail". Hopefully it arrives.
- sollewitt 2y agoWell, purely going on who it is of value to, probably life insurance providers or pharmaceutical companies.
- carimura 2y agotheir own privacy team told me they are bound by regulatory obligations to retain data even after you request deletion. I've notified our attorney general's office to see if anything can be done but it might be too late. I'd love for someone who knows these "regulatory obligations" to chime in.....
- kelnos 2y agoInteresting, as that would be a violation of the CCPA/CPRA for customers who are California residents, at least. The "regulatory obligations" sounds like a fake excuse. Is 23andme even regulated beyond how your regular average business might be?
- llm_nerd 2y ago>their own privacy team told me they are bound by regulatory obligations to retain data even after you request deletion They have to retain data about the person who requested the deletion which seems eminently reasonable. In the future if you sue them because you can't access your account that you paid for, they have a record that you requested said account's deletion. Similarly they obviously can't withdraw your data from the anonymized research projects they pursued.
- aaronbrethorst 2y agoSome billionaire should be an absolute hero: buy this thing and just shut it down. Delete all the data. Salt the earth. Move on.
- jmount 2y agoNot how billionaires work.
- MrMcCall 2y agoPrecisely. That's what we would do if we were billionaires. And that's precisely why we're not billionaires. I'm happy with my choices, though. They're merely confident and callous, but happiness will ever elude them.
- aaronbrethorst 2y agoFair point. I was a billionaire until I bought once-promising institutions and shut them down.
- seydor 2y agomillionaire
- kelnos 2y agoGiven that 23andme's market cap is under $50M right now, it wouldn't even take a billionaire.
- rvnx 2y agoThe Googley husband of the CEO maybe ?
- Mengkudulangsat 2y agoSo how does this work in the US? I thought companies in bankruptcy will be broken apart and its assets sold piecemeal. Can anyone who buy this out of auction get in one piece and debt-free?
- nico 2y agoThere are two types of corporate bankruptcy, chapter 7 and 11. Chapter 7 is what you are probably thinking about. Chapter 11 allows for “rehabilitation”, ie. negotiating debt, discharging some, and setting up a plan to get out of bankruptcy Most of the times when you see the news reporting about prominent/public US companies filing for bankruptcy, it’s chapter 11. Which is also the case here with 23andme In chapter 7, there is no rehabilitation, the whole company is handed over to a trustee, who is in charge of selling the assets (or abandoning them), and paying back the stakeholders
- friendzis 2y agoYeah, rest of the world calls one bankruptcy and the other restructuring, adding to confusion.
- llm_nerd 2y agoBoth types are forms of bankruptcy in much of the world, exactly like the US. It usually isn't differentiated which because many companies that go down the restructuring route end up at the insolvency end when debtors aren't onboard with their plans.
- Suppafly 2y agoIt really depends on how the people in charge of the bankruptcy, I'd assume preference is to sell the whole business unless it's not viable to do so, then it'd be broken into parts. Breaking into parts makes more sense when the company has several lines of unrelated business, in this case, it's basically one business so breaking it up wouldn't garner more money.
- sitharus 2y ago
- alexfromapex 2y agoAlready downloaded and deleted my data. It’s so wild that some new buyer could just buy peoples’ genetic data at a fire sale.
- transcriptase 2y agoI do wonder whether the data is actually deleted or they just do like every other large tech company and set a “deleted = true” flag that hides it from the user, since actually deleting it and all of its replicates across data centres, backup images, and tape storage is from what I’ve been told, virtually impossible even if the will was there.
- kshacker 2y agoOur industry's dark secrets getting exposed like this ... yeah you are right, we don't even need a whistleblower for this :)
- bbor 2y agoIt is the law in California, and it is certainly possible at scale, just not cheap or trivial. Presumably, given the intense focus of the state government on their company in particular, they have long since implemented a compliant deletion mechanism! The question, of course, is whether that same functionality is applied to residents of other states wishing to delete their data…
- someothherguyy 2y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soft_deletion https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soft_deletion
- silisili 2y agoIt's absurd to me how soft deletion took over the entire industry and 'DELETE FROM' became taboo.
- raverbashing 2y ago
- JoshTriplett 2y agoThis is unfortunate news for anyone whose data is now one of the assets to be sold to the highest bidder.
- kibibu 2y agoHonestly it's always seemed completely insane to me that people signed up for these services. Possible Pros: You find out you are 20% Norwegian! Fun! Possible Cons: Grandma is going to prison for an unsolved crime. Assume a non-threatening position and comply with all orders of the new Department of Racial Purity. Also, that's not your real Dad.
- Larrikin 2y agoI should have access to the data about me, it shouldn't be for sale ever. It's gross that we have access to this technology but only if we give away all our rights to a company even for a paid service. The murder one is a little more nuanced but ideally it should be a legal matter where it can only be used with a warrant or your explicit single time consent and not buried in a TOS. If you don't want to help the police convict your grandma it could not legally be used.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y agoI can go and get DNA tests for somewhere between 200-1000 AUD right now. So it’s not crazy if you have a medical reason to do so. What 23andMe did was try and build a startup around this with the intention of monetising that data in other ways later. That’s why it was so cheap that people gave them away for Xmas. Had this just been a private data base of people and connections, it would have cost many times more to get the test. Nothing has gone wrong, except for those who handed over DNA.
- jart 2y agoYou hand over your DNA when you sit down, when you stand up, when you breathe.
- LarsDu88 2y agoDamn, on Friday, the California DoJ Attorney General issued a warning to consumers about their data: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-urgently-issues-consumer-alert-23andme-customers https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont... This should've been a giveaway that the company was imminently going to go under.
- inetknght 2y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43447421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43447421
- xyst 2y agoGiven such a late warning, is there any staff left to do the data deletion requests before it heads off into bankruptcy courts
- vesinisa 2y agoLooks like the company expects to remain operational during the bankruptcy/restructuring, so I would say yes.
- flockonus 2y agoEither way, for the company customers under this circumstance I'd absolutely recommend sending all possible means of requesting data deletion, at least there should be a paper trail that such thing was requested.
- dudus 2y agoJust requested my data deletion. Seems like it worked.
- noja 2y agoDoes a deletion request delete your data, or unlink it from you? Because they use shadow profiles.
- avs733 2y agoThe immediate reaction here is customer data but I think it’s worth a reminder that this data has significant implications for non customers as well. I nearly cut contact with my mother over he wanting to use 23andme for genealogy purposes. The threat was ugly but as far as I know got her to not do it. There are a lot of people who have now made major choices for others personal data who had little meaningful informed consent. Now it’s up for the highest bidder. I have some small hope the EFF will say something on behalf of consumers and a court will listen. I it pure hopium but it’s all I’ve got.
- Scoundreller 2y agoif enough of your relatives did, you're already toast source: I'm already toast
- comrade1234 2y agoPlot twist: you’re adopted.
- timeon 2y agoSilver lining?
- hardlyfun 2y agoI remember reading an article about how these companies were big bad conglomerates who had complete ownership over valuable personal data. Not really downplaying the potential harm that can come with these "assets" in the wrong hands, but nice to know corporate is so inefficient they couldn't even avoid bankruptcy... it will be a long time before they can even hope to orchestrate complex nefarious schemes.
- gkoberger 2y ago...who do you think is gonna buy 23andMe when they go bankrupt?
- Vurdentium 2y ago[flagged]
- cess11 2y agoI would expect bin Salman or emirati royal to buy it.
- cwbriscoe 2y agoI have never participated in any of these DNA sites but I have an aunt that pretty much put in our full family tree. Is there anything I can do to remove myself without making an account?
- tylersmith 2y agoThere's nothing you can do even with an account.
- wodenokoto 2y agoI don't know if filing for bankruptcy has immediate effect of being bankrupt, but if they are still operating normally, you can apparently remove "your data", like this: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-urgently-issues-consumer-alert-23andme-customers https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont... However, that's 2 big if's: Are they still operating normally, and do they consider "your data" data you upload or genetic data pertaining to you.
- sandos 2y agoHow do you propose deleting you family tree? That info is obviously not very private.
- bsza 2y agoHow many second cousins does Mark Zuckerberg have?
- DonHopkins 2y agoIt was an extremely large egg sack.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoWell to us Europeans it is. This is PII so its handling is documented. You can requires all your data to be deleted and tastiest none is added. This deletes the "family tree" to be seen by everyone
- ks2048 2y agoThere are troubling privacy issues, but it was able to tell me: "Toe Length Ratio : Likely second toe longer". I didn't even have to look down! Maybe it was a bad idea. But, I figured if we enter a dystopian future, evil health care companies or governments could easily get my DNA if they want to and/or simply require that information to get care. When you get blood drawn, do you see what they do with it? Hopefully, what matters is the laws we all fight for and not whether I sent my spit to an internet company in 2022. Anyways, will delete my data.
- abracadaniel 2y agoYou can request your data from a section in the site first if you like. Some of the downloads say they can take a few days to generate, but all were available within a day of my requests.
- xbmcuser 2y agoLooking at how the current administration is following laws and court orders I think you might have too much trust in laws
- raverbashing 2y agoThis could actually be a plot point on a dystopian sci-fi movie (identifying people by weird metrics like toe size and such)
- dehrmann 2y agoLike browser fingerprinting.
- LZ_Khan 2y agoHow does a company like that go bankrupt? They sell kits for freaking $200. How is that unprofitable?
- Mistletoe 2y agoYou buy a kit one time in your life. I'm more amazed that people thought it could be a profitable business once everyone that was going to had purchased their one kit per lifetime. And it wasn't even $200, it was more around $100 or even less if you didn't want ancestry + health. I wonder if I can still get the locked away health part haha?
- dyauspitr 2y agoWhat do you need though? One lab and software they already have?
- xeromal 2y agoPay employees and their wages?
- Mistletoe 2y agoI assume they were doing the genotyping service at a loss. I had my entire genome genotyped for almost nothing and now I have the data forever. 23andme service was like a store having the milk in the back selling as a loss leader, but they have no other products to make up for it that you buy on the way out of the store. I see they have now added subscriptions, but who would pay for that crap when it's nonsense like if you will have a widow's peak or freckles and it isn't even right most of the time? I assume they thought they would sell all this data to someone like drug companies, but if they had buyers they wouldn't be going bankrupt.
- TheDong 2y agoThey took on VC funding. A normal "small business" doing this could run with 3 software gals, 2 genetics guys, and a CEO that handles finances and management responsibilities. A "small lifestyle business" like that could make an okay profit for all involved. A startup, however, took $XXMM in VC funding, which included strong encouragement that "you have to hire this many people, we want at least 10x growth". Once you hire a team of 30 people to manage your servers and a team of 180 software engineers to write your webpage, it's super hard to scale back down to a scrappy 3-5 person software team.
- rendall 2y agoFor what it's worth, this is on their Data page: > What happens to my data if the company is sold or otherwise changes ownership? > If the company does change ownership in the future, your data will remain protected under the current 23andMe Privacy Policy unless and until you are presented with materially new terms, with appropriate advanced notice to review those material changes as required by law. https://you.23andme.com/user/edit/records/ https://you.23andme.com/user/edit/records/
- fc417fc802 2y agoAdvanced notice to review the changes ... but can you reject them? I've yet to be presented with the option to reject a change to a privacy policy or ToS.
- rendall 2y agoYou can reject the change by deleting your data. But your district's data protection laws might be different than mine.
- arjie 2y agoIt’s a pity I didn’t upload my sequence here. I imagine in the end the most comprehensive databases win. But @dekhn mentioned PGP and I’m there. Here I am https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC Let’s see if anything worthwhile comes of it. Feel free to ask me for more. I have the raw reads as well. Email in profile.
- flobosg 2y agoJust to clarify: In this case PGP stands for “Personal Genome Project”.
- JohnTHaller 2y agoWhich is dumb as it already stands for Pretty Good Privacy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cloudbonsai 2y ago23andMe has been in a deadlock for a while. - The CEO is effectively the control owner of the company, having 49% of the voting right. She has been trying to take the company private for some time. - Last August, she proposed to buy all the outstanding shares at $8 per share. The board rejected. She installed a new board, and submitted her proposal again at $2.53 per share. The board rejected. She tried it a third time at $0.4 per share this month, and the board rejected. - Meanwhile 23andMe was losing $50M every quarter. So, unable to resolve the issue, the board choosed to enter into the bankruptcy process. I hope this relieves 23andMe from the corporate governance nightmare.
- dehrmann 2y agoWouldn't be surprised if Wojcicki faces a class action suit over fiduciary responsibility.
- linotype 2y agoSo rather than $8 a share they get zero? Sounds like the board was the one that messed things up.
- eightman 2y agoI assume the value of the remaining assets are worth more than $8/share and she was trying to get them for a discount.
- dhruvrrp 2y agoI thought the CEO was trying to take the company private, for pennies to the dollar which caused the independent board to resign (see: https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-details/independent-directors-23andme-resign-board https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...)
- 1oooqooq 2y agoand the point of going private is likely to not have to publish all the revenue sources from the data.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xeromal 2y agoI hope ancestry just buys them. They've floated a ton of bad markets and come out unscathed
- xyst 2y agoGood. One awful company that was trying very hard to sell off our genetic data. Wonder what happens to the treasure trove of data they have collected though. Hopefully the data is just 'sudo rm -rf —-no-preserve-root' and not included as part of bankruptcy proceedings.
- dtquad 2y agoCan some billionaire please buy 23andMe's corpse and delete all data and physical samples they have? Even if you have never used 23andMe several people you are related to already have so they have a partial genetic profile of you.
- leakyfilter 2y agoWhy should it matter? They can't link it to me since they don't have my genetic profile.
- ascorbic 2y agoIf they have enough of your relatives then yes they absolutely can.
- timeon 2y ago> Can some billionaire please Are we back to feudalism?
- mrguyorama 2y agoThe kind of people who become billionaires don't become billionaires by doing the right thing with no kickbacks. People who do the right thing are usually satisfied by the time they hit only 50 million.
- sidcool 2y agoAll your chromosomes belong to us.
- MrMcCall 2y agoAll your base pairs?
- shreezus 2y agoEven if you haven't personally used their service, if any close relatives have, they already have a sizable amount of information on your genome. They maintain the equivalent of "shadow profiles" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile) as part of their data model for "ancestry" modeling purposes - for example inferring a paternal haplogroup based on data uploaded by genetic relatives. I can only hope at the end of the day their data doesn't end up in the wrong hands. It is their most valuable asset, and this is a way bigger deal than it seems.
- tmalsburg2 2y agoWhat would even be the right hands in this case? Seems like almost any hands would be the wrong hands.
- smegger001 2y agoMy ideal would be customers given the option to have it delete sold and profit split with between themselves and 23&me, or anonymised and donated to the human genome project.
- mrweasel 2y agoThere basically aren't any. Almost any entity that would want to buy the company should by definition not be allowed to do so. The ideal solution would be for all data to be deleted before a sale. If anyone would want to buy 23andMe without the collected data then that's perfectly fine.
- yoaviram 2y agoSounds like it's time to send 23andMen a GDPR/CCPA/etc. data deletion request. Here's an easy way to do it: https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/23andme.com https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/23andme.com
- michaelt 2y agoI don't like 23andme, but don't the shadow profiles sorta implicitly exist whenever you're working with DNA data? If their DNA test can recognise first cousins, then they've got a recognisable DNA profile for each user's parents, grandparents, children and so on.
- karel-3d 2y ago[flagged]
- b800h 2y agoWell I'd downloaded our family genomes a while back, and had been attempting to get 23andme to respond in what I consider to be a proper way to GDPR disclosure requests. I've now just used their internal tool to delete our data. I suppose that I'm fortunate to live in an area covered by GDPR and fairly strong medical data regulations.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoIs there any useful dna sequencing offering left on the european market?
- Naru41 2y agoSuccessful Math/CS people have a hard time applying it in biotechnology. https://x.com/iskander/status/1903077361152610374 https://x.com/iskander/status/1903077361152610374 -- about a dozen of us with math/CS backgrounds ditched tech for biomedicine. And we got humbled hard: most of what we did flopped & techies
- mschuster91 2y ago> Successful Math/CS people have a hard time applying it in biotechnology. No surprise given that biotechnology has a lot more stakeholders. Ethics aren't just an afterthought because unlike VC/the stock market, academia has lots of ethics review gates in place. And for those that think they can sidestep ethics by going private (be it Theranos, 23andMe or various other such services), they'll all find out one day that it will catch up to them.
- johnnyanmac 2y agothey are all very different worlds. math works purely in theory and simply explains phenomenon. Likewise, much of software is ephemeral and gets its ethic indirectly once people are involved. to work with life is to work in factors that directly affect others, Unless you're doing something like pure biology where you simply observe. Even then, the art of observing sentient beings has its hundreds of quirks.
- wodenokoto 2y agoMy girlfriend really want to do one of these DNA analysis package from one of 23andMe's competitors, and she cannot for the life of her understand why I don't want to. How do I explain that I don't want my DNA analysed and sold around to all sorts of companies?
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y agoThere is a consensus that there is still a tremendous amount of information in someone's dna to be extracted. She wants to know what we can learn from her dna today but the cost is giving to probably[0] anyone everything we'll be able to learn from her dna in the future. That includes dna about her family and potential children with you. 10-15 years ago she wouldn't have predicted trump, what can't she predict about 10-15 years or more from now? [0]: data can't be erased but can be leaked.
- mrweasel 2y ago> How do I explain that I don't want my DNA analysed and sold Honestly you can't. I've come to realise that unless someone personally is hurt from the lose of private information, then there's no way to convince to the risks. People either comes down on the side of privacy and caution, or they completely fail to see if issue and believe that the risks are vastly overblown. Very rarely do you see anyone go from the latter to the first, unless they suffer personally.
- andy_ppp 2y agoAs an aside I actually regret signing up for 23andMe, not because this isn't a great idea but more because I find the idea that the future having copies of your DNA around we might end up in some weird sci-fi universe where people can be specifically targeted with viruses or profiled in some other way. Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen but it feels like an invasion of privacy having such personal data lying around in a small text file. To some degree it's a copy of who you are. Who knows who will buy all this data after bankruptcy... Does anyone at 23andMe know if when DNA data and account is deleted by them that it is really deleted/purged from all backups and systems? Anonymous accounts are available, thanks!
- mentalgear 2y ago> Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen Once cheap enough, be sure DNA analysis is used for better ad-targeting at scale, just as users' web traffic is analysed. All is done once economically feasible and grey-legal enough.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoSure hope GDRP would cover that since it's involving "general data"/
- mathgeek 2y ago> Not that I'll ever be important enough for that to happen Not that it keeps me up at night, but it’s fascinating to me that if we ever get to the point where a machine is in a position to care about your DNA, it probably will have enough resources to not need to rank anyone by importance.
- napolux 2y agoexact same reason why I never fell for their scam ads.
- aucisson_masque 2y ago> Who knows who will buy all this data after bankruptcy... People who think having millions of people dna is worth something. I could think of company working with private investigators or even governments. Your dna sample is part of 23andMe valuation right now, I wouldn’t have hope even if it says your data is removed on their website, there are still backup.
- mentalgear 2y agoI recall when 23andMe was featured on the cover of a popular tech magazine. At the time, I had concerns about the risks of sharing DNA with a company. However, the article highlighted that one of the co-founders was the wife of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, and the company's association with (and investment of) Google provided a sense of data security and stability. .... now it might be sold for (data) parts to whoever.
- asdffdasy 2y agoanyone remember when one of those dna testing companies was offering free dna testings in some atlanta(?) neighborhood, but then someone found out it was being paid by the local PD to try to find dna that matched someone they were looking for? I'm certain i read about it from HN but i can't find any reference to that new anymore.
- Popeyes 2y agoGuess we are about to find out how valuable your DNA is.
- drakonka 2y agoDoes initiating deletion through your 23andme profile settings effectively invoke right to be forgotten/ensure data will be deleted in 30 days? Or is that effectively a soft delete that requires additional followup for a RTBF request?
- c16 2y agoYour DNA, now available to the highest bidder.
- yapyap 2y agoyikes, thats all your dna, sold
- rchaud 2y agoSPAC IPO = not long for this earth.
- username135 2y agoI take full responsibility, I deleted my data yesterday and now the company has filed for bankruptcy.
- evanwpm 2y agoHighly recommend that anyone interested in this company listens to the episode of the Freakonomics Radio podcast about 23andMe: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-23andme-going-under-update/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-23andme-going-under-... Seems like they struggled to turn a one-off purchase model into recurring revenue. At some point everyone in the world who cares enough about their DNA has already bought your product.
- bananapub 2y agoplease go and delete your data, immediately. it's not just for you, but for anyone related to you - this database is hugely dangerous thing to have exist, and always has been, but at least notionally was a semi-serious medical business, but is now going to be sold for scrap in an extremely poisonous environment in the US.
- basisword 2y agoI just don’t understand why anyone would ever have used this. I’m not a very private person but this always seemed like giving up so much in return for so little. Not to mention the people that found out negative things like great grandad had three families. I imagine if you try to delete your data now it’s conveniently too late/no staff around.
- webspinner 2y agoWell... I'm an untested person! I never bought into the hype, because I don't ever do so. In fact, I told friends of mine in 2021 not to do so either. They said they had the test kit on their counter, and were debating on spitting.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoPress release: https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-details/23andme-initiates-voluntary-chapter-11-process-maximize https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...