5 ms·
Honestly 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
by kibibu 2y ago
Honestly 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.
- sandos 2y agoWhy was this downvoted? Your close family also shares your DNA, to 100%! Suppose your parents both test.. Your DNA is not something that you can 100% keep from others.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y agoI think because it was unnecessarily conspiratorial. I can’t just sequence DNA can you? Do you think government agencies are collecting your tissues?
- jart 2y agoIt's not a conspiracy. That's what we call a startup. You've never heard of airborne dna data collection? Go cry into your pillow :) Reality is always so much more extreme than the conspiracies. Conspiracy theorists lack the minds to imagine half this stuff.
- dekhn 2y agoSure, people can sequence DNA in their garage if they want. You need to know how to do it and how to not mess up all the details if you want to get reliable data. As for government collecting samples from the environment, they (researchers funded by the government) already do that- it was used in COVID and many other places.
- jart 2y agoThey have USB thumb drives for sequencing DNA nowadays: https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion You can use that toy to find out pretty much everything about anybody. This is just a technological paradigm shift that's happening. What made 23andMe different is that (a) they got YOUR consent, (b) they made the information useful to YOU. So no one here should blame the people trying to help. It's always the people trying to help who face the backlash of reactionary fear and anger. Since reactionaries never ask themselves what they're not seeing.
- dekhn 2y agoI think you probably meant to reply to somebody else. I was thinking of the minion when I said "you can sequence in your garage". I was agreeing that things like airborne detection exist. I'm not blaming anybody, except Anne, who was woefully naive about the business and the science. I did try to point out that most people who try to sequence things on their own mess things up because sequencing and sequence analysis is quite tricky. Svante Paabo, who helped establish that we can sequence ancient humans, acknowledged that his first few people were really just analyzing his own sequences, as he contaminated the samples while handling them. The minion is really quite limited- it's a convenient tool to have in the field, but nearly everybody who is doing serious sequencing is using larger, more expensive desktop machines in a lab.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mrweasel 2y agoThe murder one scares me. The police and legal system are way to comfortable with using DNA evidence, not understanding the insecurities of it. Danish police had to reopen over 12,000 cases where DNA evidence was used and redo everything because neither the police nor the judges understood that the tests used an insufficient numbers of DNA markers to uniquely identify a person. Most of the incorrectly identified people was exactly innocent, but people went to jail over drug charges that should have been a warning or a fine.
- bhaney 2y agoI discovered I had around 20 half-siblings I never knew about and got connected with most of them. > Also, that's not your real Dad Yeah, that part was less fun
- davely 2y agoI just commented about the same exact thing relating to my wife. Even down to 20+ siblings! Like, it’s so common that I’m not even shocked to hear others with this experience. As it turns out, there were a lot of sketchy clinics preying upon desperate parents in the early 1980s.
- fc417fc802 2y agoWhy do you say they were preying on them? The donor either matched the stated criteria or didn't.
- vintermann 2y agoThere is no honour among eugenicists. There's even an own Wikipedia page for fertility doctors who used their own sperm - with a long list of cases.
- jart 2y agoA lot of us trusted and supported her because she was married to Sergey. No one was expecting that once she had the data she'd divorce him and go full Marissa Mayer.
- benjaminwootton 2y agoWhen I saw the headline, I wondered why Sergey hadn't bought it for his spare change. I guess this is why.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoHe also married (and divorced) the woman that bankrolled RFK Jr. I would guess his office affairs have caused a lot of drama at Alphabet.
- julianeon 2y agoI guess I'm in the camp that considers your con a pro. If my Dad wasn't or isn't my biological dad, I would want to know. And I'd be grateful to any service that informed me.
- davely 2y agoThis exact scenario happened to my wife. Grew up thinking her dad was her dad and that she was of some certain ancestry. I remember her and I both spitting into a tube in our SF apartment in San Francisco in 2012 and mailing them off. A few years later, we look at the ancestry data and there is a big surprise (she was ~50% something that she was sure 0% before that). Turns out her dad wasn’t her dad and she was donor conceived — this has potentially huge health implications if you don’t know this. By some fortunate circumstance, she ultimately found the donor… and 27 (and counting) siblings! Turns out the clinic where this all went down at in the early 1980s was sketchy and lied to a whole bunch of people and misused samples.
- linotype 2y agoHow did this impact her relationship with her dad?
- DonHopkins 2y ago[flagged]
- dyauspitr 2y agoI signed up with a fake name and a prepaid debit card. They’re going to have to work hard to get mine.
- sitkack 2y agoNot with any relatives by k-hops they won't.
- dyauspitr 2y agoYeah but they would need to be looking for me specifically. I think it would offer some form of anonymity in blanket sweeps.
- mkl 2y ago> they would need to be looking for me specifically I don't think so. They probably automatically determine how closely related all their customers are, so it just takes one of your (possibly distant) relatives putting in enough family tree.
- vasco 2y agoThis combination of being aware enough to use two fake data points while giving away your whole DNA is making me chuckle.
- dyauspitr 2y agoI really wanted to know what’s in my DNA. I did the best I could.
- whyenot 2y ago> Possible Pros: You find out you are 20% Norwegian! Fun! It's kind of irritating the way you are minimizing the "pros" here (and you aren't the only one at HN who has done this recently). There are people who found their parents and siblings thanks to 23 and Me. I found my father and my half sister. Maybe it's not important to you, but there are people out there who are willing to "pay" a lot to find out who they are. I appreciate that to you it may not feel like a good trade, but please have the empathy to understand that for others, it is.
- sofixa 2y agoYou aren't your sperm donor, or your grandmother. You are who you are, based on the genetics you got from all of them, and importantly, all the nurture you've received and learning you've done since that moment. Reconnecting with lost siblings is a legitimate thing one can want and which can bring closure, etc etc but definitely doesn't have anything to do with who you are.
- rvnx 2y agoThe other pro is that with the 23andme file you can use Promethease, which helps you to figure out health risks and preventively adopt lifestyle or schedule appointments to discuss them with a health provider.
- theshackleford 2y agoI didn’t fuse this service, but I used another after experiencing life changing health circumstances in an attempt to identify the half of the family I don’t know. Fuck me right?
- kibibu 2y agoOk,i was hasty in listing fun as the only pro (although that's certainly the only reason I can think of for giving these out as Xmas presents) Only you can decide if it's worth it. I hope it was for you.
- theshackleford 2y ago> I hope it was for you. Ironically no, because all I got out of it at best was at best your list of pros. I already knew I was likely a european mongrel because i'm white as snow, so largely useless sadly.
- DonHopkins 2y ago> Also, that's not your real Dad. But meet your new Big Brother!