It’s the same as infosec in general. Most people don’t know about the risks, and anyway are bad at quantifying tail risk.
1. I'm simply not that important. There are millions of other people who have given this data to 23 and me and the like, and I'm just some rando peon - nobody is going to be specifically searching for my DNA.
2. The "worst case scenarios", e.g. getting health insurance denied because you have some gene, still seem implausible to me. Granted, there is a ton of stuff I thought would be implausible 5-10 years ago that is now happening, but something like this feels like it would be pushed back against from all sides of the political spectrum, even in our highly polarized world.
3. I haven't murdered anyone, so I'm not worried about getting caught up in a DNA dragnet. Sure, there can be false positives, but to get on in life you pretty much have to ignore events with low statistical probability (or otherwise nobody would even get in a car on the road, and that has a much higher statistical probability of doing you harm).
Even moreso if they're one that would be a physical threat like you're suggesting?
While they may still be useful, they have an image of infallibility that doesn't line up with reality.
Their use as evidence has been challenged by academics, judges and the
media. There are no uniform standards for point-counting methods, and
academics have argued that the error rate in matching fingerprints has
not been adequately studied and that fingerprint evidence has no secure
statistical foundation. Research has been conducted into whether experts
can objectively focus on feature information in fingerprints without
being misled by extraneous information, such as context.
There is always the risk of a society or government changing that definition after they have the data and it’s too late to go back.
I'm just saying I'd like the state to have to work hard to put people away. The law can just as easily be wielded to harm people. I don't see much sign the american public agrees with me, and politicians certainly don't agree. Even mr "it's a witch hunt" trump is only anti-LEO when it comes to his own crimes. But I'd rather have some low background level of crime than the sinking feeling that we're imprisoning a lot of innocent people, as unpopular a sentiment it might be to some in this country.
Besides, if the government doesn't take care of society, higher crime is inevitable.
1. If I had a family member who was a serial murderer or rapist a la the Golden State Killer, I would want him apprehended.
2. "the criminal might well learn/suspect that they have been compromised through you?" That doesn't seem reasonably plausible enough to me to care. What, cousin Billy Bob is going to come hold me hostage because he knows I used 23 and me at some point? Really??
But you are apprehended instead and are responsible for now coming up with an alibi.
What if an unknown biological relative of mine happens to be a billionaire and gifts me $10M like he does for all his other relatives?
We're halfway there, data mining by insurances already is the norm in car insurance. We should have fought back hard back in the day this was proposed.
> I haven't murdered anyone, so I'm not worried about getting caught up in a DNA dragnet. Sure, there can be false positives, but to get on in life you pretty much have to ignore events with low statistical probability
Even if you haven't murdered anyone or intend to to so - your genetic data is useful in the pig dragnet. Your genetic data may be what provides the pigs with a link to your nephew who moonlights as a graffiti sprayer... and yes, the German pigs are doing DNA checks on graffiti sprayers, they have been doing so for over two decades [1].
[1] https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article398332/Graffiti-Erstma...
All that is to say, it's not a "hot" take to shit on the police. In fact it's a pretty popular one. Just turn on the radio or the TV.
If you honestly believe that, you live in an echo chamber on this topic. This Gallup poll from 2024 reported a majority of Americans have either "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the police: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-...
But more importantly, the police were the 3rd highest rated institution, behind "small business" and "the military". They ranked above "higher education", "the church or organized religion", "public schools", "organized labor", "banks" and "newspapers".
I know a couple people in different police forces. From what I have been able to tell they are like myself and the other people I tend to be around. Mostly decent people trying their best to be good humans for themselves and society.
People don't hate cops, they hate the things that happen when corrupted people make it into the job and do corrupted things because of the power that job wields. Or when they are or have been caught breaking the law by cops who are doing their job to enforce the law.
I have never heard of anyone hating cops for showing up to help when their assistance was needed.
> [...] Mostly decent people trying their best to be good humans for themselves and society.
What do you think would be an honest answer to "how many times have you let another police officer off the hook for something that a civilian would have been arrested/given a ticket for"? Like - how many times per year? How severe are the violations?
[added] I don't disagree that there are institutional forces at work and that does happen. At the same time, when it is very obviously illegal that ruins others; if they cover that up, that puts them in the corrupted people category for me. The individuals not the entirety of the force
Oh, the naivety. It's hard to hear someone hating cops who showed up to help after the cops who showed up to help shot them in the face to death. For example.
"If you have a problem, and call the cops, now you have two problems".
Also, if you re-read that quote, it states "showing up to help". If they shoot you in the face they didn't show up to help did they?
It’s one of those things that’s upsetting, so our brains exaggerate the actual relevance.
the Institute for Justice ;
etc.
Just because you've never seen it advertised doesn't mean it isn't happening. And there's 3300 counties in the US, and fifty state police entities, plus however many municipalities with police forces. Also, if you AAL, "qualified immunity" makes it difficult to "go after" individual police, so most suits are filed against the city and the department for having "bad policy" - because proving civil rights violations is quite difficult, even if it seems like a cut and dry case.
A couple of times in my first five years or so, someone called and had a story that sounded plausible, and I got the video - either from the car or the venue. After watching them, I basically stopped taking those calls.
The US cops are paragons of professionalism and courtesy compared to that, and most people in the US, like, don't mind with cops, compared to those places. (This is with all the known non-ideal performance of the US cops.)
At the moment pigs can break the law and abuse their authority any way they please with barely any chance of getting even a slap on the wrist - and even if they kill someone, chances are high they'll either get off entirely on "reasonable fear" or they'll get pardoned.
Again, if your goal is to convince people (or at least have a constructive dialogue) why they should care about genetic privacy, all you have done for your average person is convince them even more that your opinion should be discounted.
My wife also did 23andme some years ago, through which she discovered she had Factor V Leiden—a fact which became extremely important very soon after her discovering it, leading directly to changes in her treatment and how closely they monitored her for blood clots (she had a PFO and some other stuff going on that was already compounding her risk of clotting and stroke), and very possibly may have saved her life.
I’m supposed to go in and delete every trace of it out of fear of what the down-on-their-luck company might, or simply could, do?
While I know that my experience might be rare, I would regardless suggest that you reserve your skepticism, because you aren’t really in a position to assess who did or did not derive a justifiable amount of value from it or how informed of a human being they are
I don't tell anyone now to use 23andMe specifically, but the warnings and risks being discussed here apply to existing customers, to people who have already done it, and I am just speaking as one of those people.
But certain general ancestral data can be deduced from variations in your DNA that are observed in some known current/historical population. I.e, I share much in common with people sampled from Scotland -> I must be Scottish.
It's either matching to specific people in the service's reference group who have declared that they are Scottish, or it's trying to guess based on the mix of ancestral populations 2000+ years ago ("western hunter gatherer", "early Neolithic farmer" etc.)
I'm just another random anecdote, but I also found I had Factor V Leiden through 23 and me. Also, I'm gay, and for a long time was the only gay person I knew in my extended family. Through 23 and me I discovered a 2nd cousin who also is gay, and I met him in real life and it was an incredibly meaningful and important experience in my life.
Yeah, these experiences may or may not be rare. I was positing that they might be rare mostly to try to meet the person I was responded to halfway and because I don't actually have evidence one way or the other
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests...
Non-heterosexual behaviour can be observed in most social amniotes, even those without fingerprints. Genetically-identical twins do not have identical sexual proclivities. There's no a priori reason to believe there's even a "gay gene" to find.
So at most a perfect genetic test could give a percentage chance of someone being gay/straight.
I guess that's pretty much what you said.
23andme had little data on my fathers side so it split my mothers side into my family tree at the great grandfather level. I spent awhile tracing people only to discover my father and mother side seemed to be related. After going on Ancestry I was able to figure the mistake.
Myheritage had European links. 23andme North American links. Ancestry had everything. The genetic time period they match against are different. 23andme matches against 100ad while ancestry 1200ad. So if you are Celtic perhaps your people were in Spain in 100ad but in Ireland or Scotland by 1200. Using different services gives you a fuller picture and understanding of human migration and your migration. The difference from 23andme telling you you are broadly northwestern european vs Cornish/Welsh/Scottish is huge but illustrates what you match against really changes your identity.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020428094626/http://www.wired....
Indians are most at risk of genetic exploitation. Hiring managers won't need to ask annoying probing questions about your family to sniff out your lineage if they can just look up your DNA profile to see what caste you belong to.
And Jews were self identifying and dna isn't going to tell you if you are gay or not.
Ethnicity can be easier discovered through last name, visual clues rather then stolen hacker data.
The fears are similar to fears around your commodore 64 accidently logging into a war games scenario and destroying the world.
Most people in Russia who identify as Jewish and/or emigrated to Israel have non-Jewish last names. You really would never know if they didn't file the paperwork.
Wouldn't they use the citizenship data they have from the last 100 years? If they used 23andme data wouldn't they have floods of people from US, Canada, Australia, who could claim a new citizenship?
These tests do not do a full detailed analysis if you want that you need to find a clinic and pay thousands of dollars. For what they do tell you I wouldn't be afraid for the entire world to see.
Discovering who you are, where you came from, discovering who your relates are, what your last name is, where people with your genes live now, the backstory on how your wave of immigration came and where they settled and why has been worth it.
The information exposed by 21andme was profile and ethnicity information. I'm okay with any of that becoming public, the public part of a facebook profile shares personal data. Actually I wish more people would ask me about my ethnicity data. I think it would make a great addition as a facebook profile section and if facebook still allowed developers to create profile addons I would create one.
As an aside does anyone remember catbook addon?
You are probably aware that at least two European countries no longer collect this information, and the reasons for introducing this policy?
https://qz.com/2029525/the-20-countries-that-dont-collect-ra...
My guess would be to protect European identity from the reality. Europe has a different level of acceptance of foreigners and a history to protect. I can accept their compromise because of their political situations.
In Canada it's promoted. In the US it gets combined into American identity and promoted in Europe it's hidden.
You being a sample of one doesn't give you any position either, but I won't be suggesting reserving your enthusiasm.
Speeding is a choice, one that's extremely easy to change, and it ultimately an exceedingly trivial matter.
You are born with your genetics, and you can’t change them. You are them. They will likely impact how and you die. All you can do is be aware of them so you can try to be proactive.
So there’s really no comparison between that and voluntarily driving a car too fast
If that’s genuinely how it worked, where the more health problems you are at risk for, the more money you have to pay, this would result in the people who already have the shittiest stuff to deal with in their lives having that compounded by also having to pay more than everybody else.
Not sure what more needs to be said, but if there is anyone out there who is unconvinced, I probably won’t be inviting them to dinner parties anytime soon
If someone has a higher probability of getting sick / dieing / getting in a wreck then the risk is different and should be priced accordingly. If you don’t, you’re not taking about insurance anymore. You’re talking about a wealth transfer system where good drivers subsidize the bad.
There's no divine directive that states that risk sharing must be done by voluntarily joining a pool run by a private entity that's priced uniquely per individual. That's merely one way to go about it.
To be fair it's the only sensible way for a private entity to go about it in the absence of legislation that prevents others from being more efficient. In the case of the US specifically, as long as everyone is forced to play by the same "inefficient" rules the free market will continue to work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...
Did I get that right? If so, is there an ongoing value you want to maintain, or it more out of respect for the organization that provided you value in the past?
Most people haven't died or had their bank account drained due to bad opsec, so I'm guessing they are accurately assessing the risk as "could be worse". There are so many things that could kill you day to day that people rightly don't care about your pet issue.
One can argue that these people may not have understood that a transaction was occurring. I would argue that this is beside the point. Their intuition is hard to discredit in the face of their lived experience. Aside from the marketing spam, most people are probably right in thinking that they've been better off with Google/<alternative> than without.
We can pontificate that people should know more about what they agreed to, and so on, if only they knew better, etc. But this rings hollow and very hypothetical to the vast majority of us. It's worrisome in thought exercises, but not validated in real life.
Most people I talk to about this, tech and non-tech folk have an attitude with a.mix of "you can't escape this anyway, so might as well embrace it" and "misuse scenarios you are describing are pretty far-fetched".
Hi Laszlo, I'm making the trip on Friday, we can meet at 10 and you can put the stuff in my purse, it should be fine. Don't forget the jewels, that's the only reason I'm doing this.
Perhaps this could be solved with a class action law suit, that would make it illegal for private entities to own the data post fact, combined with how it was marketed, etc. I’ve seen interest rates for credits reverted this way and credits reduced, for similar reasons. But again, it’s a trade off here too :)
This refrain is repeated endlessly but I've never heard a good argument as to why it must be this way and if it was any other way Google simply couldn't exist in any (ideally better) form.
(Too much for my taste.)
Then you have to factor in that (far) fewer users are going to use/pay for their products if it's a subscription.
It's a though calculation for sure.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...
Google is making it based on theoretically unlimited searches for everyone. No caps in the number of searches.
You have to to the $10 USD a month tier with Kagi to have the same expectation met, which is unlimited searches
I think Google profits massively off of the ignorance of its users and is reliant on their unawareness that they're producers of actual relevant data.
Curiously, they had a solution of sorts in a program where you could basically bid for your own ad buys to remove ads from pages. For some reason they shuttered this program down. I didn't even know it existed until after it was gone, frustratingly. I thought it was a neat way to allow the industry bridge to other funding models.
(Or perhaps such a business model relies on tracking that's been deemed invasive. Who knows.)
Because in reality this is just an opt in donation to Google. It's always cheaper to just block ads entirely.
Had 23andme had access to my DNA, that might be worse in future. Although today there is not immediately a lot of downside, you can certainly imagine futures (maybe slightly dystopian ones) where that turns out to be pretty bad.
I don't think I even want anything new from Gmail. It's spent that decade (and most of the one before) holding all my email and serving it to me, that seems pretty good given I haven't had to pay them a cent for it.
And 23andMe was already offering a $100 DNA sampling in 2008.
It’s easy to be cynical about this in 2025. Those who didn’t live through the early 2000s, can’t even imagine the amount of optimism surrounding the tech industry at that time. Giving my DNA to a cool new Silicon Valley firm in 2008? Sure, why not, it was like buying a ticket to some utopian future.
E.g. tons of people take Uber/Lyft with no consideration about how those companies can take your travel history and daily schedule to monetize or sell to 3rd parties.
DoorDash - what if they start selling my order history to insurance companies as a variable to predict obesity/mortality?
HN/Reddit - what if some LLM scrapes all my comments, de-anonymizes me, and sells that info to a data broker?
Visa/Mastercard - what if 100% of my credit card history is sold to data brokers? (Spoiler, it already often is!)
Just trying to illustrate that even in 2025, we pick and choose what to view through rose colored glasses and what to frown upon.
In the example of Uber/Lyft, I willingly give up my home address and even let me know every time I’m out of town! (Trips to airport) yet that seemingly doesn’t cross my mind when requesting a ride.
I don’t disagree with your comment, but IMO what was true in 2000’s is still true today: people overlook risks of things when the benefits are substantial enough. That’s human nature
The shopkeeper knows your face and every baguette you ever purchased three times a week. Every miller within 300 km knows about that time you complained about the stale bread they sold you.
What is the big diff and nobody needs high tech to compromise your privacy
Elsewhere in this discussion there are people talking about how "the common man" doesn't understand the risks of privacy loss. Well it really doesn't help that when those risks materialize you also have people claiming "well no one could have seen that coming".
Made even more opaque by the way the DNA kit folks gave the impression of a straightforward, first-party transaction: you pay a not-insubstantial sum for us to do this service now, you get your report, done!
23andme started out as a democratized sequencing company
google started out as a search company. It became an identification and dossier-building company later.
or maybe I'm naive and they were data-grabs from the start.
Google is an advertising company. Google exists because businesses advertise and Google became, overnight in geological terms, the sine qua non of advertising.
Consumers aren’t really OK with sharing gobs of private data, but most don’t have a choice, many enjoy the free shit that they get from Google, most don’t notice or realize how much and what kind of data is collected, and none zero zip nada of us can stop Google from doing it.
This is absolutely nothing new in thousands of years. Businesses have sold and hoarded and collected and traded consumer info since time immemorial. Among themselves, with government, with law enforcement, with criminal gangs, who knows. You’re simply deluded if you think any commercial activity is private or confidential for a consumer. Yes even if you pay with $2 from your cleavage.
why more people don’t take their personal privacy seriously.
Probably because this testing has been happening for almost 20 years at this point, and we’re still waiting to hear about someone being harmed. For the most part, the privacy concerns are FUD.
People who have been for instance wrongly jailed because Google gave their location history to law enforcement and they happened to be near a crime scene, these people they understand the value of privacy.
These horror stories are so rare that the vast majority of people has never personally met anyone who personally knew anyone who had it happen. So it's all entirely theoretical and speculative for people who are busy and have social life goals. It's rightfully seen in similar light as the pepper hobby or extreme zero waste green philosophy. Worrying about it is basically a hobby, an identity, a community, an esthetic. Most people have some other hobby and identity and don't need this one.
Or in countries where people criticizing the government policy disappear.
Yet it's a reality for Billions of people in Russia, china, India until not so long ago.
I mean, the world isn't just limited to the west where, at worst, you will get personalized advertisement and in very rare occasion something worst.
How would for instance, Women in the USA having to remove period tracking app because they are afraid it could be used by the government against them, fit in your thought ?
It’s neither black or white, privacy nuthead or political activist. There is a wide spectrum.
It’s a pretty simple cost/benefit equation.
For 90%+ of people, the benefit (or appeal) of seeing an ancestry report is greater than the cost (or risk) of handing over your DNA.
That said, it’s definitely fair to question why more people don’t take their personal privacy seriously. The reality is companies like Google (and 23andme) simply wouldn’t exist if everyone cared as much about privacy as the HN crowd. Google exists because consumers are fine with sharing their data, for better or worse.