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I 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 rig

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  You hand over your DNA when you sit down, when you stand up, when you breathe.
  - sandos 2y ago
    Why 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        It'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 ago
        Sure, 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 ago
        They 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 ago
        I 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
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mrweasel 2y ago
The 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.

2muchcoffeeman 2y ago

I 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 ago
You hand over your DNA when you sit down, when you stand up, when you breathe.
- sandos 2y ago
  Why 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      It'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 ago
      Sure, 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 ago
        They 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 ago
        I 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 ago

The 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.