[HN Gopher] Ancestry to paywall formerly free features included ...
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Ancestry to paywall formerly free features included with DNA kit
Author : ilamont
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-01-14 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (easygenie.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (easygenie.org)
| failrate wrote:
| That's fine, I will just wait for the data to leak.
| rideontime wrote:
| > Blackstone Inc., the private equity firm which owns Ancestry
|
| And there it is
| Oarch wrote:
| Founder of 23andMe was literally married to Sergey Brin (until
| he shagged the intern).
| andybak wrote:
| 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?
| eganist wrote:
| probably, but you can try getting a refund first. If they
| refuse, charge it back, cite this article.
| chuckadams wrote:
| 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.
| caesil wrote:
| Private equity playbook: buy, squeeze, discard husk
|
| https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-completes-a...
| dennisy wrote:
| 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?
| echelon wrote:
| I'm more worried about not being hired because of ADHD markers.
|
| Or dropped from insurance.
| theshackleford wrote:
| Good thing some of us live in countries that are not a
| complete joke I suppose.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Your nationalism won't save you from this.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This would be disability discrimination.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There's also the possibility that somebody's feelings could get
| hurt if unexpected family members are discovered.
| nothercastle wrote:
| 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
| science4sail wrote:
| What happens if you send non-human DNA? e.g. a sample of your
| dog's saliva?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| You pay to have your DNA put in the database to be shared with
| insurers.
|
| Optionally you can get access to the results if you pay more.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| And also police agencies.
| 23B1 wrote:
| And also intelligence agencies, foreign and domestic.
| delfinom wrote:
| The US outlawed that in 2008
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
| nothercastle wrote:
| I'm sure data brokers are totally respecting that
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| 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.
| nothercastle wrote:
| How do you know they won't sell your info. They may have a side
| deal with life insurance companies for example
| charles_f wrote:
| 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
| cheriot wrote:
| This is what's held me back. Unlike a password or account
| number, I can't undo a data breach (or legal exploitation) of
| my DNA.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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.
| vazma wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| The cynic in me says data is never deleted, just housed
| separately, forever.
|
| Someone prove me wrong, please.
| temporarara wrote:
| 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.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| 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.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Are there any non profit alternatives? GEDmatch was this until
| it's 2019 acquisition by Verogen. https://www.openhumans.org/
| perhaps?
|
| Seems like a license is needed where the data must be destroyed
| upon change in ownership or control (or regulatory equivilent).
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controvers...
| srj wrote:
| 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?
| shagie wrote:
| Not the best example.
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-su...
|
| (The license from Pantone to Adobe expired and things happened)
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