This was just waiting to happen tbh
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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I’ve been telling people since this dna testing started that sooner or later that data will be for sale, an insurance company will buy it, and then get used against people to increase their health insurance rates or deny claims.
But I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist according to everyone ;)
Same reason I don’t want to buy a new car anymore…
Same reason I don’t want to buy a new car anymore…
Because of the "driving behavior" data that gets sent out via secret cell connections and bought by insurance companies?
Yup. Go ahead and try turning that cell phone radio thing off. Why do you need an app for remote start? Why can’t it be on the keyfob anymore? But again, nothing to see here - just the continued enshittification of everything.
I just pulled the fuse. Problem solved. Phone start doesn't work but never used it.
Safest thing that would actually work is to take out the battery. ;-)
Not on electric cars. LOL
What! What cars have this???
Yes, unfortunately. I dunno if it's a global thing or just in the US, but several years ago, they started sending your car's computer data to insurance companies, who then use it to determine how well you drive and what insurance rates they want to give you.
It's really scummy.
Here is at least one of those reports the other poster touched on
All cars for awhile. Mozilla released a privacy report a year or two ago and it seems nobody cared. Which is why they can do this stuff.
Wonder if the ones without apps do it.
Even if a relative has shared their DNA, it can be used to make some fairly safe assumptions about yours.
My car's computer doesn't transmit. It doesn't log anything more than engine fault codes. That's how I like it.
Find me a car produced in 2024 or later which does this
2024 Suzuki Swift.
You even need to dial in the date and time manually because there's no GPS either.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3476295/Suzuki-Swift-2024.html?page=548#manual
LOL I told everyone the same. Same on my end, they thought I was being conspirational. As if a company could never one day fail and have to sell their assets. It seemed impossible to them, somehow.
I used to think that part of the reason is that they submitted their samples without thinking and later contemplating how not smart that action was; created some hard cognitive dissonance, making calling me a conspiracy theorist the far easier pill to swallow than admitting a mistake. Since I know of people who did it early on, as they thought they were being cutting edge at the time.
Yeah, I do not want to buy a car either or anything that sells in subscriptions. I am already keeping an eye on models of non-smart TVs for when my current model finally dies. LOL
GATTACA! GATTACA!
I am surprised it took this long. But they got hacked 2 years ago, so data on millions of people had already been leaked.
They were surviving on fumes since since they were still dealing with the fallout of that.
I knew the whole idea of letting a company get your genetic fingerprint was a bad idea from the start. Being curious about my ancestry wasn't worth it.
That’s great but all it takes is some of your blood relatives to submit their genetic data and they can calculate your genetics to a degree that is accurate enough.
So... Orgies for privacy? :D
Luckily for us, all family members either saw what OP saw ahead of time, or the few that were curious listened to others and didn't go through with it. Exactly because of the reason that you stated.
Not just yours, but your family 's DNA. You are not much different from your siblings and parents. I was pissed when my brother told me he did one of those stupid DNA tests.
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Yeah, I feel like I dodged a bullet. As I knew some family members who thought about it but declined to do it because of the for-profit angle in case the company flopped.
This is the perfect example of why privacy matters. No matter how much you trust a parent company one day when the investors come knocking they are legally obligated to liquidate all assets to the highest bidder. Today its 23andme tomorrow it could be discord, google, amazon, Facebook or any other tech company.
In case people only saw the headline....
The sale is because a breach already happened: "hackers obtained personal data of about seven million of its customers in October 2023".
They cannot afford the lawsuits.
Hmm.
One of the notable issues is that this process also won’t delete all of your data — according to 23andMe’s privacy disclosure, your genetic information, date of birth, and sex will be retained for an undisclosed amount of time to comply with the company’s legal obligations,
A merger or liquidation is not a valid purpose to store personal, and especially Art. 9, data, as covered by the legal basis of legal obligations, according to GDPR. So, if you are in Europe, they would have to delete it.
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How to remove your data from 23andMe
I wish I could. I have been trying to get my account back for months.
I hate this understatement so fucking much. No, those 15 million are just the people that directly gave their dna to 23 & me.
In reality, you only need to sample the genetic data for a small sample of the population to get the genetic information for the majority of the population. These people have relatives, and 23 & me has their data, too. They have most of ours.
Saying it just affects those 15 million is such an abysmal misunderstanding of genetics.
That's what pisses me off. I'd never give my data willing, but it's unwillingly given through any relatives that did do this.
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What a pile of fuck, not a decent person at that company to deep-six the data before they left
Why would anyone expect anyone to risk getting sued or risk going to jail for that? Fully get want you are saying, though.
The smart thing was to never trust some random upstart company with a cutsie name with the code of our literal DNA. Caveat emptor and all that.
So much wrong can be done if it ends up in the wrong hands in any of a multitude of sectors, from military contractors to insurance companies who could literally up premiums based on DNA profiles and propensity for illnesses. And that latter one would be one of the most docile of outcomes.
but when it happens on the dark web it's so incredibly illegal, but when a company does it...
You can remove the data yourself but you need to log in with biometrics. A retinal scan, a face recognition scan and a fingerprint. /s
Does whoever purchase the company's assets have full rights to the DNA data though? Wouldn't there be some kind of restriction for that kind of thing?
I'm going to buy it all and work on my super human...
No one has any right to complain, this possibility is clearly outlined in the t&c's every person agreed to.
Shouldn't have handed out your defining essence to a corporation.
What about those of us who are related to the people who took the test, and never consented to the t&c? They have our data, too.
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Kinda wacked out take. Onus shouldnt be on the individual
While I do agree its a bit whack, I question if everything needs 100% safety to be legal?
If someone offers a dangerous thing and you sign a waiver, maybe motocross, if you get injured is it the owners fault? Why should an individual be free from onus?
New Zealand understands this, you can sign away a companies liability to yourself. For adventure tourism stuff mostly. It's a good and fair way to do things I think.
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I don't think it is reasonable to expect every individual to become a privacy / legal expert. I think people should have reasonable protections and assurances given to them without needing to study the details of everything they do on a case-by-case basis.
We have laws about what food can and cannot be sold - so that individuals don't have to personally test and monitor every product for safety. Privacy & data could be done like that too.
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Ok, either you let this slide, or I personnally strangle every living lawyers.
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"The fuck else were these people expecting" is also my visceral reaction whenever shit like that happens, but if I think about for a bit longer, I realize that it's not much different than saying "The fuck else were you expecting" to a rape victim who went alone into a dark alley. Sure, people are stupid for engaging with this obvious scam, but the bad guy is still the scammer, not the victims.
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