As much as it can be to get some intel on your origins, between the pseudo-scientific aspect (see examples of labradors getting their results), the innate risk that your data gets exploited for something else (ancestry is owned by blackstone), and the risk that they get hacked and the data gets leaked (see their competitors), I don't see how you can reasonably use this service
> I don't see how you can reasonably use this service
I won't. I've compiled 25k names in Ancestry and am fairly fastidious in my family building. The dopamine comes from finding people/relationships that everyone else missed.
But I won't submit DNA to hurry that along and I try to talk anyone out of it I can.
The interval between introduction of cheap DNA and misuse by LEO was about 5 minutes. We now have a situation where one person creates risk for many family members. There are some incomplete safeguards in place but they will erode eventually.
That was enough to put me off at first but then came reports of comparing results between the big 3 or 4 DNA analyzers, with little-to-no agreement on origin.
I will grudgingly admit there's value in helping people who don't know their blood relatives - especially groups with few/no ancestral records (eg:African-Americans).
I even gained a nephew who was put up for adoption. But I don't think that pays for the eventual moment when bad actors (LEO, corps, etc) are routinely able to leverage our DNA against us.
On Ancestry, it is definitely possible to link relations in the tree via specific blood, adoption, step-, or whatever.
At this point, I have five grandfathers. I also suspect that my birth mother has a recent NPE in her tree as well.
I've been working with a cousin who's a "DNA Angel" and she has some extremely strong views on who is a relative and who isn't. Her comments border on the offensive to me, someone who was adopted and loved by a family who aren't technically related to me, while my birth family has no legal claim or relation to me other than just being FB friends.
The melding of DNA and documentary evidence can be an extraordinary thing, and unlock all sorts of mysteries of the past for your family. It's interesting for me, when my ethnicity report is so cleanly delineated, that I can figure out which relatives I can't possibly be blood-related to, because of their country of origin, back to several centuries ago.
For me it was the experiments where identical triplets got different ancestry results, even though any full siblings in the world including non-identical ones have identical ancestry.
People will be quick to blame private equity. The private equity playbook is quite literally to cut costs, raise prices and load up with complicated debt then sell the business before the complicated debt explodes. That's just scratching the surface.
We have ample evidence of what works for sites that contain what is essentially user-generated content. All social media sites, Wikipedia, Ancestry, numerous others. Gracenote/CDDB [1] was one of the earliest examples on the Internet. The model that works is Wikipedia.
This is all so painfully obvious when you examine such enterprises through the lens of the workers relationship to the means of production. Users here are the workers. They're creating the value in these sites. Without these workers these sites are worth nothing. Wikipedia works because it is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. This isn't quite being owned by the workers but it's a lot closer than any for-profit enterprise. Oh and simply being a non-profit doesn't solve the problem either.
Every social media site will go through this: increasing value extraction to maintain profits that will ultimately destroy the site. Ancestry isn't a socia media site but it follows the same pattern.
This is a sore spot for me. Ancestry.com is where I found my birth family about 5 years ago. My adoptive mother gave me a DNA test for Christmas, and the whole family took them. Then, my father loaned me his credentials for his All-Access Ancestry.com account. Through that access, I was able to build a family tree for my birth family that goes back to the 17th century. Perhaps not entirely accurate in all those generations, but it's a start.
Unfortunately, as soon as Ancestry mandated MFA for all accounts, I lost access to my father's. This was a good thing, because we weren't supposed to be sharing in the first place. But I also lost access to all those tools for research.
To add insult to injury, there are no export tools for getting your data out of Ancestry. It's a roach motel. So the only hope I have is screenshotting or printing the most important stuff, and rebuilding it somewhere better. I don't know where to go at the moment. I certainly can't afford service at the level my father is paying for Ancestry.
It isn't entirely complete, but you can export trees from Ancestry as GED files, which is the closest one can get to an interoperable family tree file format.
> as soon as Ancestry mandated MFA for all accounts, I lost access to my father's. This was a good thing, because we weren't supposed to be sharing in the first place.
Don't let the smiling bastards gaslight you into thinking that's a good thing.
No, social media accounts are really and truly personal things. Having my father's account meant that I could read all his DMs, I had access to all the trees and other relatives' DNA tests, and I could essentially impersonate him on the site. This made me really uncomfortable.
If Dad really wanted to help out my research, then he could've picked up the tab for my own subscription on my own account, which I do have.
It's not like Netflix where our recommendations would just be tossed in a blender. It's about trust and identity.
If someone is comfortable with that, I don't see the issue. I had a pair of grandparents who shared an email address, and IIRC we saw some customers who did that when I was working on banking systems a couple years ago.
Actually I'm kind of tempted to set up a shared email for my wife and me for exactly things like that. She's already the main user of my Facebook account, where she goes on gardening groups or something.
> If someone is comfortable with that, I don't see the issue.
Perhaps the account operators are comfortable with that, but what about their contacts?
Account sharing is explicitly against Terms of Service in certain cases. I know wives who run email accounts under their husband's name, and nobody's the wiser. I suppose that's alright for an intimate married couple.
Once on a mud long ago, one of the players had a persona as an attractive young woman, and she was known as one of the most active and wittiest people in our social circle. Then upon reaching a crisis, "she" admitted that her character had been alternately controlled by a woman and her live-in boyfriend, handing off whenever they saw fit. So some of us felt a little shaken by the deception. Of course we all knew from the start, that many "female" characters in the MUD world were not so in real life.
There was an MMOG I used to play where account sharing was forbidden, and quite bannable. I had worked many long hours on building a skill that would be useful to our whole group, and I let it be known that I would be available for anyone who wanted me to help out in that regard. Yet, the other leader maintained an alt character to sort of circumvent a game mechanic, and the idea is that we'd all share the credentials to log in to that alt account and use the character. I was livid, because that activity could've got them all banned by association, and also because they just didn't seem interested in the service I offered them. Oh well.
It's funny. On the threads about the 23AndMe sorta data breach where 14000 users fell to credential stuffing 23AndMe was criticized for not requiring MFA.
I bought a DNA test as an Xmas present for my partner because of the related functionality. Do any consumer protection laws kick in for such recent purchases?
Let's face it: the DNA kit purchases are merely a come-on, to entice you to subscribe to their full-access services. You didn't really think that a one-time fee would afford you all sorts of features in perpetuity?
When you give them your DNA, you help build their network effects monopoly.
As a genealogist, I would like (or rather, would have liked) to figure out certain things about my ancestry. It may be a man who married several times, and his children are known, but not which came from which wife - this is very common. Or it may be someone who suddenly appears in a place with no obvious relatives around - where did she come from? DNA can help solve such problems, but you need common descendants. As many as possible. Direct male and female lines are especially valuable.
Take the last case, the woman appearing out of nowhere. If you can find a direct female descendant of her, and you find someone who isn't, but has sufficiently similar mitochondrial DNA - they may be a direct female descendant of her sister. Genealogists use tricks like these to find connections that would otherwise be impossible to find from the documentary record.
But for it to work, you need a big database of people who have submitted their DNA. And they're currently all owned by sleazy and exploitative multinational companies with cozy relationships with government agencies. These companies also exploit that much of their customer base is elderly (and so both have more money, and are easier to milk as they don't have the expectations of younger people that "giving them your information should be more than enough payment" - which is after all how all social media sites run)
The issue is there's no long-term business since there's little more to learn once you've seen your ancestry and connected with a few relatives, and these services are running out of new customers to sell $100 DNA collection kits to.
People here are blaming PE, but 23andMe is public and flaming-out on its own. Blackstone bought at the peak, so they're probably taking a big loss on this, and this will just speed it up.
I thought the Mormons owned it due to some religious beliefs about bloodlines sharing the same after life. Article clearly states black stone owns it now. That’s frightening. I uploaded with a fake name years ago, regret it deeply. Though it did help me diagnose my wife with a potentially life threatening condition that is easily treatable but rarely treated for until after complications. Still, I can’t believe gone dumb I was. It was a Christmas gift.
If it's over how law enforcement is using the data, the cat's out of the bag regardless of what you do. If it's future genetic discrimination, for once, regulators seem to be on top of things.
They get your DNA, which they can use as bait to sell more DNA collection kits. I've seen countless discussions in genealogy forums where they discuss which services you are most likely to find relatives in, depending on where you came from.
I made a test few years back and I really regret it. I requested my sample to be deleted from the db and I downloaded the dna in my local server. Hopefully they really deleted my DNA and it didn't leak while was there.
All they'd need to do is create "shadow" companies where they store backups of the data, suddenly you can't really get them to delete your data anymore.
It requires investigations and evidence and it metes out fines for non-compliance, eventually.
A fine doesn't reverse stolen/hacked data, nor does it work particularly well on the megacorps who just eat it as the cost of doing business.
If there is more profit to be had than it would cost in fines then that's not a deterrent, its a tax.
Until the fines are proportionate to the offence (whatever the profit is/was + punitive percentage) it's only going to deter those who can't pay the current fixed rates.
Probably not even housed separately, the "deleted" tag is just now "true". That's just how pretty much all these corps roll since they can get away with it.
That doesn’t cover life insurance. California law does. My relatives live in states with fewer legal protections for residents and I strictly urge them not to use DNA services.
There are services that will sequence your DNA and give you the same type of result Ancestry and 23 and Me would do for about $700 IIRC, with a bonus they won't sell your info.
I suppose that doesn't help with finding relatives by DNA though. I can think of a few ways to maybe do a public database that could hash DNA samples...if you submit a sample that's close enough to someone else it would unlock some contact details. That would be vulnerable to brute forcing, so there would still need to be a way for both parties to verify each others DNA before exchanging real names and other info. If that could be solved though, it would make services like Ancestry.com obsolete.
The same way you know that they aren't sending special agents to harvest your DNA from your Starbucks cup and analyze it without you giving them any permission in the first place, or that your bank actually has your money, or that the government actually exists: you don't, but you have to engage with the world at a baseline level of assumption of good faith when not proven otherwise, or you'll lose your mind, and it's generally worth noting which corporations acknowledge potential abuse cases, specifically and affirmatively commit to not doing them, and have a plausible monetization and profit scheme without any hidden abuse.
Back when I worked in anti-spam, we were constantly blocking ancestry.com, or at least whichever spammer they hired to do their mailings that month. Right up there with Gevalia Coffee.
Yes, they really are that bad. Go in there and "unsubscribe", and change your interface language to Chinese while you're at it. Now they spam you in Chinese.
Doesn't exactly inspire trust in this company's willingness and ability to protect extremely personal information.
We are well past the need for a massive upheaval in privacy rights, and if this won't come from muscular government intervention, I would not be shocked if hacktivists started just destroying vast swaths of data stores, since we already see actors with the capability to do so holding the data for ransom instead. Such an attack could be more discreet too. The situation is simply out of hand
I wonder how much damage is being done to science – and our ability to improve human life – thanks to dirtbags like Blackstone, Ancestry.com, and 23andme.
I'm fast losing my faith in the free market because of this handful of companies who are quite obviously incompetent or outright evil.
Not overly related, but I just received a kit for Christmas and I am a little worried about sending my DNA to a company for storage and possibly sale later on?
Does this concern anyone else, that in some not too distant future, ads etc could be DNA targeted?
One important aspect to consider: You putting your DNA online will also potentially effect your children and other direct relatives whom you share most of you DNA with.
You might be OK with the risk but are you willing to decide for you children who might grow up in a potentially very different society?
You have certain markers for certain mental health issues? Thank you for your application but the position has already been filled. Health insurance? We run a background check and unfortunately we are not able to make you an offer.
People that say you will not be discriminated for your DNA because such discrimination is not legal are absolutely delusional.
Not to mention people are still straight being murdered in some parts of the world for having the wrong ethnicity. Things can change very fast in your country.
Possibly of getting mistakenly matched to a criminal in the database. These dna tests have 99.9% accuracy but in large enough #s the .1 comes to bite hard. Also any future children are at risk of becoming suspects. The criminal justice system is imperfect it gets false convictions all the time why risk it
Can a company seriously start charging for features that were already paid for? If I buy Photoshop, can they suddenly decide I need to pay extra to keep using the color green?
What's even more galling is that they introduced a "Pro Tools" subscription with some extra features for for $10/month that they are trying to sell to their existing subscribers (the ones that pay hundreds per year for access to their databases).
People are doing this to themselves, once these companies are done squeezing regular people asking for DNA tests they'll start mass selling genetic information to "keep growing", in fact they probably are already doing it.
The second you see politicians like Bernie sanders endorsing them as some sort of lifelong goal they wanted you should automatically get a red flag about it.
Also, do not do this to your relatives, imagine they detect a disease in you ut the gene is not active but your brother/sister did not take the test but has the disease due to how genetics work, now who is to say a company won't get that data or health services and simply not give them anything? Just curiosity about your ancestry is not enough to justify giving your genetic data to a company, please do not use your instagram brain for something that might heavily influence you in a bad way in the future.
Any government is free to restrict such practices within their borders. And in a functioning democracy the government is the collective will of the people, meaning there is only a limited band of decisions they will likely make. I think it's fair to conclude that countries like France wouldn't allow hiring decisions or insurance premiums to be influenced by genetic markers, while the US might.
Are you really willing to bet that the political system in France will never change, not just in the next few years but for your whole lifetime and that of your children or other direct relatives?
Once you DNA information is out there, it is basically impossible to retract. If history teaches us anything then that political change can come very abruptly and is hard to predict.
Just look at the Balkan, where people went from peaceful neighbors to ethnic cleansing basically over night.
Show me a rule and I'll show you a corporation that not only breaks it, but does so willfully and without remorse. No country is free from this, especially not in Europe.
