throwaway4567
That said, I suspect Ancestry.com is much less useful for those living outside the United States. In particular, having ancestors who lived in the country at least 72 years prior to the most recent US Census is what makes Ancestry.com most compelling. That's when census records on individual people become available, as outlined at https://www.census.gov/history/www/genealogy/decennial_censu.... Ancestry.com has done high-resolution scans of all US Census records and parsed them with decently accurate OCR, so you can plug in a (likely deceased) ancestor's name and get their street address, age, occupation, rent/mortgage, those living in the household with them, etc.
I have also not tried their AncestryDNA product, and probably will not. If I were to try direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing, I'd probably use 23andme.
There are also significant benefits to biological research. Most genetic variation is rare, and the effect of each of these rare variants is small, but they add up. Having access to larger datasets will allow us to be able to better correlate those variants to diseases. 23andme is already doing this with Genentech: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/01/06/surpris....
Are you implying that an HTTP header sent in the request to 23andme upon clicking the confirmation link would contain the forwarded email address of the user?
Unless the user were on a web page that included their email account name in the URL (and thus visible in the REFERER header), I don't see how that would happen. And I don't think I've ever seen an email system that puts the account name in the URL.
That seems unlikely, though. The article's approach is probably enough to prevent one's genetic information from being passed on to such insurance providers.
You can. See "How to use 23andMe without violating your genetic privacy", https://www.abine.com/blog/2013/23andme-without-violating-yo....