Please note I'm not saying I disagree, I'm simply asking if you can elucidate the problem further.
The same sort of thing happens to non-adoptees all the time - one's cousins who do family history research may know decades before you that they are your [near] relative.
Aside, it's also interesting WRT privacy of sperm/egg donors. I recently commented in a thread (on Reddit I think) that an egg donor should be aware that it may be quite likely, even if not presently possible, for the child to trace them [the biological mother in that instance] in the future either due to tech or legal changes. This was flatly dismissed as an impossibility; little was I to know it might already be quite possible [in the sense of being attainable by the general public].
1) I don't even have access to my own information at this point. It's like if the doctor were to post a picture of your newborn baby on FB without your permission before you got to hold it.
2) The accuracy of 23andme's ancestry information is suspect. They think we might be related based on vague data. And again, the other people have this vague data before I do.
3) Finally, there is medical information attached to my account. For instance, maybe I have a normal risk of prostate cancer. Now 23andme decides that I'm related to Joe (true or not), and Joe has a super high risk of prostate cancer. What inferences can be drawn about that? What if this kind of data is shared with a third party -- again, without my knowledge -- and that third party can use that against me somehow? (Insurance, whatever.) I'm not okay with that.
In the end, it's the opaqueness of this process. If 23andme wants to say "Hey, we're not 100% done with your ancestry results, but we found a few people we think might be matches" at the same time they say the same thing to the other people, then that would be okay. But at the time, I was getting requests from alleged relatives that I had no way of knowing they were alleged relatives until 23andme gives me my results.
In other words, these other people -- strangers! -- knew something about me that I hadn't yet found out myself, when it should have been made available to me at the same time.
This isn't true at all. Nobody sees your name unless you specifically set the privacy setting to that which I can't imagine anyone doing.
Nobody has ever seen my name on 23andme and I see maybe 1 out of 1,000 people's names when they say that they've found a possible relative. Those 1 out of 1,000 people have set their privacy settings to allow that for some weird reason.
In that case, if you do have a match, obviously both people will have to be notified of the other's identity. It sounds like you want to see whether you have relatives before the relatives get to see it. How is that fair?
Also are you sure these other people are getting your identity? How do you know it's not masking your identity to these only people which only gets unmasked if you accept/reply to the request?
At this point, I have my information and now that I have it, I'm okay with sharing it, because it's my information to do what I wish. But they were sharing it before they shared it with me, and that's not okay, imo.
One of the features they provide is ancestry help. They compare your DNA with all other users' DNA and then give you a list of potential relatives. They say "hey, you guys share .6% of the same DNA, you might be 3rd to 5th cousins."
That's cool, right? Especially for someone who is adopted.
The problem is that it takes 2 weeks longer to do the ancestry stuff than it does to do the medical stuff. The medical results showed up in my account about 4 weeks after I sent off my spit-filled test tube. The ancestry results showed up a full month later. In the meantime, between medical results and ancestry results, I'm getting "friend requests" from other users. There are no messages attached to these users, but I presume they believe, somehow, that they are related to me.
How can this be? I hadn't yet received my own ancestry results.
I emailed 23andme.com support, and here's what they said:
> Thank you for contacting 23andMe.
> If you've been genotyped through our service, you can share your genome with other 23andMe users and compare yourself with them using our various features.
>This is of special interest to members who are interested in their family's data.
> Due to the way our computation process works, some of your relatives can actually see you appear in their list of DNA Relatives before all your results are uploaded.
Let me repeat that last part:
> Due to the way our computation process works, some of your relatives can actually see you appear in their list of DNA Relatives before all your results are uploaded.
So get this: my name and some level of my DNA results are shown to complete strangers, and not only that, but they are shown before I even get the information.
That bothers me. That bothers me a lot. I haven't yet decided what to do about it, but believe me, I've spent a great deal of time considering this since it happened.