I mean, there's the fact that companies like this also provide your data to DNA databases that governments and other companies have access too. That seems like a good reason to shy away from getting their tests done.

Yeah, who know's what happens to the data after it leaves you. I know I seen on the news the military was advising against it, I guess if your DNA was leaked in a data breach someone could create viruses that target specific people, sounds far fetched like out of a science fiction movie though so not sure how realistic but I guess in theory it could happen. But ironically, many states like California collect newborn babies blood at the hospital after birth and stores them - even selling some samples to outside researchers, which is true if you look it up but if you tell people that they think you are some conspiracy theory tinfoil hat wearing nutcase instead of doing their own research rather they just attack you, not sure if parents are even aware. Looks like they are supposed to be informed, but the state isn't sure if that happens always by the doctors or nurses at the hospital. Wouldn't surprise me if it's just a small sign on the wall somewhere no one notices.

I have been wanting to though do one of those DNA tests but never got around to it since didn't want to spend the money right now and the whole privacy thing. I never knew my real dad, so I was kinda curious. Then on the other side of the family originally came from the South like Alabama or Tennessee and then before the US Germany but who knows if true just what I've been told by some family, but they very well could be wrong. I'm not sure how true or detailed those reports are either from these DNA test companies.

Smart phones also leak data. While you didn't mean this, I do think there's some sympathy here - the people that don't care about their data being out there because they 'have nothing to hide' probably feel the same way with their genetic data being out there.

23andME need to figure out a follow-on product to get the folks that have already taken the base test to purchase. Otherwise they have no new market to address.

That’s exactly why I’ll never use them.

I sent a saliva swab and got my dna analyzed by 23andme. I got back information I already knew such as where I came from etc.

Serious question. IF the government catches a relative of mine who is a rapist or a murderer from my dna, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Could someone please explain what could go wrong. Keeping our community from heinous criminals is a good thing isn’t?

ah, here we go. The notoriously flawed "I'm doing nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide" argument.

There are so many reasons why this is wrong and it is a pretty well known philosophical stance. A couple reasons:

- You assume that the government is acting for your best interest. What would happen if we elect a crazy president that changes the direction of the country? (Think WW2 Germany with their eugenics). - You are not doing anything wrong but don't you have information that you want to keep private? Getting an STD for example is not illegal but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like that medical information available after a search with your name on Google.

Yes, I did not think of laws that can change in the future. I will reach out to 23andme and request the deletion of my dna results and my account. I hope it works.

I'm curious what you mean by philosophical stance. Could you expand a little?

> Keeping our community from heinous criminals is a good thing isn’t?

Yes, but there certainly is a cost to doing that, and at some point the cost outweighs the benefits. If that weren't true, then the argument could be used to insist that every place, including every room in your home, should be subjected to government surveillance 24 hours a day.

Forensic genealogy isn't perfect. There are a few different kinds of DNA tests and comparisons, and some of those are better than others, and which one is used and how the DNA is collected and the interpretation of the results is still left up to human beings with badges, so it's still error-prone. This has led to people being wrongly accused, and even convicted, of serious crimes:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/genetic-genealogy-can-h...

https://gizmodo.com/when-bad-dna-tests-lead-to-false-convict...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/forensics-gone-wrong...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-m...

The problem here is that DNA evidence is currently considered infallible by law enforcement and jurors, so very nearly no amount of contradictory evidence will get you off the hook if a DNA test matches you to a cold case.

The police don't charge anyone based upon a 23andme test. They couldn't given that the typing done by 23andme and friends is an incomplete chip analyzed subset used for ancestry and some health tests.

If you took that 23andme test and uploaded it to GEDmatch, however, there are genetic genealogy experts who can figure out family trees, with which the police can narrow in somewhat to try to figure out who might fit a crime. Then they can ask you to volunteer a sample for comparison, or covertly get one.

It has been spectacularly successful. A lot of cold cases have been getting solved because of such analysis.

As to your list of URLs, I think people should actually read them. A guy had a trivial inconvenience after he had a familial match with a violent rape, and he met all of the other criteria (travel area, made a movie about a violent murder of a young female, etc). Then he was exonerated. He could have had more of an inconvenience if he simply had a car that looked slightly like a suspect vehicle, or the same hair style, but this is the example of overreach? Another is an absurd misuse of DNA in Taiwan that has zero applicability.

The final sentence is just nonsense. The DNA isn't even the lynchpin in most cases, the police instead building a case given that lead.

It's also worth noting that one of the greatest tools for exonerating people wrongly convicted is....DNA. Many people who unjustly spent decades behind bars are being freed based upon DNA.

Thank you for your well researched response. That answered my question.

Yeah, but that has nothing to do with the decline. Normal people don't care.

And then there's the fact that if your parents did it, why would you do it? My parents did it so now I have exactly zero reason to do it myself.

Also all the negative publicity behind data being sold, which should surprise nobody.

That isn't really true though. You aren't some kind of clone of your parents. Imagine that both of your parents sit down at a table. Each one has 100 dominoes in front of them. Each parent will randomly take 50 of their dominoes and put them in the center of the table. Those are your 100 dominoes. It could be that your mother has 20 "scottish" dominoes, but not a single one of those dominoes are in the set given to you. You might look at your mother's dna results and say "I'm 20% scottish!" No you're not. You got zip from the scottish side of the family.

With 23 pairs of chromosomes we have 46 dominoes each (ignoring recombination.) This changes the odds of inheriting none of your mother's Scottish dominoes from 1 in a million (2^20) to 1 in 512 (2^9).

> This changes the odds of inheriting none of your mother's Scottish dominoes from 1 in a million (2^20) to 1 in 512 (2^9).

That may be true for mom, but conservatively, there's between a 1-in-100 and 1-in-20 odds of inheriting none of your father's dominoes.

It's been a while since I've taken high school biology, but the odds should be the same as the mother. Scottish-ness is not something that's limited to the X or Y chromosome.

Mitochondrial DNA will only come from your mother, but I don't think we're talking about that here.

What's the mechanism at play here? Each chromosome pair is one from the father and one from the mother.

> What's the mechanism at play here?

cheating

Right, but unless you get your own results you have no idea how the dice rolled for you (how many other game metaphors can I use?).

What if I don't give a shit about being "20% scottish" and only care about relatives-I-didn't-know-I-had and genetically-heritable-illnesses and my parents' reports were clean?

Half siblings are probably the most interesting “relatives-you-didn’t-know-you-had” you can find! They might show up at any time, and you wouldn’t know without having your own account.

that line of reasoning sort of proves the uselessness of even using 23andMe in the first place

No, all it means is you can't look at someone else's results (even parents or siblings) and think that your results would be the same.

>You might look at your mother's dna results and say "I'm 20% scottish!" No you're not. You got zip from the scottish side of the family.

So then the DNA results themselves are wrong since they're based on exactly this logic, just for your parents...

Therefore making the entire thing completely useless.

No, all it means is you can't look at someone else's results (even parents or siblings) and think that your results would be the same.

It would still provide information about health, since you don't inherit all of your parents' alleles. (For example, if your parents are heterozygous for an allele and you'd like to know your status.)

Because you can have a mutation that your parents don't have?

23&me most like will not help you there as they are only looking for relatively well known mutations and not de-novos. They are basically scanning a few (or less) million variants but there are billions of possible new ones

23andme is pretty useless for getting great information from your DNA. I say this because you can get a much better report by exporting the raw data and then ordering a more detailed report from promethase.

Yes, but if you get a mutation in one of the SNPs they test for, it will show positive even though both parents are negative.

Not just that, but when you read about them, they pretty much host their data on law enforcement hardware. Not that I think the Golden State Killer should be on the lam, but it's kind of concerning that a person with whom you share a great-grandparent with can put you in a police dragnet.

This keeps coming up by people who are seemingly confusing 23andme with GedMatch. They are very different platforms, and even the latter has greatly changed their law enforcement policies.

23andme requires a warrant. They publish a transparency report and since 2015 they've gotten a grand total of 7.

Having said that, if my DNA catches a distant relative who commits severe crimes, that hardly discourages me.

As an aside, what's with the bizarre moderation of HN lately? The circle of users allowed to downvote has gotten perhaps a little too big as the utilization for noting "this does not conform with my biases" has turned absolutely Reddit-like.

The parent post is wrong about 23andme -- it doesn't matter if you like the company or not, their point is wrong -- and the notion that you're caught up in a "dragnet" because of a far off ancestor committed a crime implies that you think the people who do genetic ancestry are idiots.

You may be technically correct, but the complaint is just a facet of the deeper (more real) issue: people want to own and control their data and they increasingly do not trust other parties. Even if 23&Me requires a warrant rather than a suppoena that's just nuance lost in a haze of "the customer is the product" exploitation that consumers hate yet feel forced to accept just like "click through" legalese.

> This keeps coming up by people who are seemingly confusing 23andme with GedMatch. They are very different platforms, and even the latter has greatly changed their law enforcement policies.

This confusion matters if the average customer is making decisions based on that info. It doesn't matter (yet?) that they require a warrant and are transparent. All that matters is that enough people believe 23andme will share personal data for sales to be affected

I would expect it to matter on HN. Facts matter. Increasingly people are just saying entirely wrong, easily disproven things and because it sounds right to whatever the bias of the crowd is, it's accepted.

However I doubt that angle has any relevance to their sales decline, beyond the most fringe element. As others have rightly said, the majority of people who have an interest in the information that 23andme offers have already done it or a competitor, having probably picked it up over one of the multiple Prime Days, etc. They do have revisions of their chip and improved information, but thus far they haven't marketed that for repurchases.

Agreed. I don't think law enforcement concerns are a factor in the decline either (else Ring doorbells wouldn't be flying off the shelves etc.)

> you think the people who do genetic ancestry are idiots.

I've seen anonymous but redacted proof-bearing confessions from people these companies saying they "fuck with pure white people" by throwing in random ethnicities, so...at minimum, not all of them respect the integrity of their work.

Which shouldn't surprise anyone, due to...them being humans.

It sounds like you read an absurd fan fiction. The notion is absolutely ludicrous for a variety of reasons that are too boring to get into here, but it is absolutely remarkable the nonsense parroted about 23andme on HN.

Sad news for you endorphone: you're a 100% match for a serial killer based on the limited analysis and shoddy lab work that contaminated your 23andme sample. Here's a court order requiring you to submit a new sample to us. We're also going to need your passport so cancel that vacation you had planned.

This is somewhat of a misconception. The variants they test for change over time as new biologically significant SNPs and haplotypes are discovered.

One of the things that is a little misleading about how they present results is that a "negative" result means they don't know (i.e. not one of the SNPs they test for) rather than you have a "normal" copy of some particular gene.

> there's no reason to ever buy the product again once you've done it once

Actually I did it once about 10 years ago, and since then they've added a bunch of new diagnostic analyses they will perform, including a couple that are relevant to my family and I've been tempted to do it all again.

(although wait, do they need more saliva, or do they just re-run my existing sample?)

As far as I know they do need a new sample of saliva because they don't store the ones they already analyzed.

There's room for new products/features. They already offer a second more expensive tier that includes more medical related information. As they do more association tests and the like they'll probably be able to tell people more and more based on their dna.

Right. From the product development side, what else is there? Upsell on newer test results? Sell you your genetic code as a poster?

How come people usually only go to driving school once and these schools still make a living?

Simple: they're not venture-backed so no one is expecting billions from them.

23andMe could be a longer-term sustainable business but taking $700m from investors means you must keep growing even if there's no really opportunity for growth.

driving schools likely have far more customers, a constant influx of customers based on age, and driving (in the US at least) is a necessity, and thus supplies the market. I'm also just spit-balling here: the cost of a tech company's upkeep is FAR MORE than that of a driving school's

Sharing DNA data with cops, after the fact surely doesn't help