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> That’s a tiny percentage: about 0.02% of your genome. So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it. What kind of reasoning is th

> That’s a tiny percentage: about 0.02% of your genome. So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it. What kind of reasoning is that? Fine, they're not doing whole genome sequencing on you (yet), but having a detailed chip profile of several million informative SNPs absolutely can and will be used to profile you. Very quickly and easily I might add. Classical linkage analysis has been used quite effectively to profile people since the 80s using only a handful of (polymorphic) markers, because the power of the analysis is driven more by the number of related members than by the number of markers of an individual. 23&Me has a customer base of more than 10 million people(!!)

exe34 1y ago
They don't have all your personal information, they just have your name and address.
- compiler-guy 1y ago
  Which makes it trivial to buy a database and correlate everything.
  - Rendello 1y ago
    I think GP was making a joke about the (small!=unimportant) information.
    - exe34 1y ago
      i.e. they can get the rest of it by sending ICE to pick you up.
mcv 1y ago
Of course they don't store your entire genome; 99.9% of that is identical for all humans. That has no value to them at all. It's only the 0.1% that can vary between humans that's of any interest. (Note that there are very different ways to measure that percentage and they can mean very different things. I'm not intending these percentages to be accurate, but I'm sure you get my point.)
otherme123 1y ago
> Fine, they're not doing whole genome sequencing on you (yet). We do Whole Genome Sequencing, and sometimes we outsource the sequencing. We always get the excess of DNA back, and it is stored in our own freezers. Even in this scenario we can't be 100% sure they don't store the DNA or the files for their own purposes, but that's the risk we assume. The DNA we send is only identified by a number. I can 100% imagine a company such as 23andMe storing DNA for later sequencing, or even doing WGS to do their side business, while sending you back only the genotype. Did you request your excess of DNA back? No, you didn't, because you didn't even know how much you sent or how much is needed for a genotyping. What you did was linking your DNA with your real name and some extra data, so further data augmenting is trivial.
- vintermann 1y ago
  > I can 100% imagine a company such as 23andMe storing DNA for later sequencing They do, as far as I know. Most genealogical DNA testing companies do, and they tell you so. In case you want to upgrade the analysis later. > doing WGS to do their side business That would land them in hot water with the EU. Per GDPR, you can't ask for PII for one purpose and use it for something else down the line. 23andMe customers didn't consent to WGS. But there's another reason I think they wouldn't do that, and that's that WGS is time-consuming and expensive. Some random person's DNA data isn't that valuable. There's a reason payment is part of their business model, and if that's true for cheap microarray tests, how much more isn't it true for terribly expensive WGS tests?
  - otherme123 1y ago
    > terribly expensive WGS tests https://services.bgi.com/wgs-sequencing https://services.bgi.com/wgs-sequencing Making a report is expensive. The WGS maybe cheaper than you think (I don't know how much you were thinking). Then running a quick admixture and some PRS analysis on the data by yourself, with the aid of ChatGPT or some of its friends if you have zero clue, it can be surpringsingly affordable. BGI is chinese, but there are other services out there doing similar services (e.g. Macrogen in Korea).
    - 1y ago
vintermann 1y ago
> but having a detailed chip profile of several million informative SNPs absolutely can and will be used to profile you. Yes, that was 23andMe's business model. They thought so too. Since they went bankrupt, I think it's safe to say, the commercial utility of such profiles was pretty overrated.
shellfishgene 1y ago
Yes the 0.02% thing is a bit disingenuous because he knows better: the bases the chip covers were specifically picked because they are variable in the human genome. They don't have "your genome", but as most of it is the same for everyone those 640k snps give much more information than 0.02% of the letters of a book would.

exe34 1y ago

They don't have all your personal information, they just have your name and address.

compiler-guy 1y ago
Which makes it trivial to buy a database and correlate everything.
- Rendello 1y ago
  I think GP was making a joke about the (small!=unimportant) information.
  - exe34 1y ago
    i.e. they can get the rest of it by sending ICE to pick you up.

mcv 1y ago

Of course they don't store your entire genome; 99.9% of that is identical for all humans. That has no value to them at all. It's only the 0.1% that can vary between humans that's of any interest. (Note that there are very different ways to measure that percentage and they can mean very different things. I'm not intending these percentages to be accurate, but I'm sure you get my point.)

otherme123 1y ago

> Fine, they're not doing whole genome sequencing on you (yet). We do Whole Genome Sequencing, and sometimes we outsource the sequencing. We always get the excess of DNA back, and it is stored in our own freezers. Even in this scenario we can't be 100% sure they don't store the DNA or the files for their own purposes, but that's the risk we assume. The DNA we send is only identified by a number. I can 100% imagine a company such as 23andMe storing DNA for later sequencing, or even doing WGS to do their side business, while sending you back only the genotype. Did you request your excess of DNA back? No, you didn't, because you didn't even know how much you sent or how much is needed for a genotyping. What you did was linking your DNA with your real name and some extra data, so further data augmenting is trivial.

vintermann 1y ago
> I can 100% imagine a company such as 23andMe storing DNA for later sequencing They do, as far as I know. Most genealogical DNA testing companies do, and they tell you so. In case you want to upgrade the analysis later. > doing WGS to do their side business That would land them in hot water with the EU. Per GDPR, you can't ask for PII for one purpose and use it for something else down the line. 23andMe customers didn't consent to WGS. But there's another reason I think they wouldn't do that, and that's that WGS is time-consuming and expensive. Some random person's DNA data isn't that valuable. There's a reason payment is part of their business model, and if that's true for cheap microarray tests, how much more isn't it true for terribly expensive WGS tests?
- otherme123 1y ago
  > terribly expensive WGS tests https://services.bgi.com/wgs-sequencing https://services.bgi.com/wgs-sequencing Making a report is expensive. The WGS maybe cheaper than you think (I don't know how much you were thinking). Then running a quick admixture and some PRS analysis on the data by yourself, with the aid of ChatGPT or some of its friends if you have zero clue, it can be surpringsingly affordable. BGI is chinese, but there are other services out there doing similar services (e.g. Macrogen in Korea).
  - 1y ago

vintermann 1y ago

> but having a detailed chip profile of several million informative SNPs absolutely can and will be used to profile you. Yes, that was 23andMe's business model. They thought so too. Since they went bankrupt, I think it's safe to say, the commercial utility of such profiles was pretty overrated.

shellfishgene 1y ago

Yes the 0.02% thing is a bit disingenuous because he knows better: the bases the chip covers were specifically picked because they are variable in the human genome. They don't have "your genome", but as most of it is the same for everyone those 640k snps give much more information than 0.02% of the letters of a book would.