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oneJob

also, I don't trust them with my DNA data anymore.

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They added this today, too: https://www.23andme.com/transparency-report/

Interesting!

Notably, "Percentage of Requests Where Some Data Produced" is all 0%.

why, what happened?

I remember reading somewhere that they share the DNA info with gov't agencies.

gattaca!

Probably. Unfortunately, this precludes someone who is privacy-conscious from using these products, as cool as they may seem. I can't imagine how the government would put this information to anything other than malicious use.

SNP sequencing is the ultimate fingerprint, far more individually identifying than anything else as of yet. Imagine having 900,000+ criterion to cross reference to determine identity.

If the gov't really want a DNA sample from you is it that hard to obtain? I understand this allows them to do it en masse though.

What happened was that the police was using some publicly available data to cross reference with cold cases. Then when they found a familiar match, the produced a warrant to get the identity of the family member that was registered. The main issue was that the info was available, so some tech just ran the comparison. However, it feels like it would be way to easy to request the information directly with a warrant and that's it. Using something like: "We need to save the women and children, here is a list of unidentified DNA samples, please compare them to all your database."

SNPs may be more identifying than fingerprints because they are correlated across related individuals.

Presumably http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-..., which was posted on here a few days ago.

Can you use a fake name?

You probably can but there is so much information in there that it might be trivial (or become trivial) to know that the name is fake based on some other information. But I guess it might be harder to tie it back to the real name.

Yes. A friend of mine is currently doing this. They used a fake name and paid with a pre-paid Amex "gift card". They had it mailed to a P.O. Box. I believe they may have used VPN and private browsing while ordering and looking at the website, and obviously created a new email account with hotmail, or whomever.

Now, obviously, you're asking them to sequence your genome, so they're getting personally identifiable information. If you have relatives who have done their 23 and me work-up, then they'll be able to tell that "John Doe" is related to Gunther Kumar, or whatever. In my friend's case, that's not likely to be an issue as they have few living relatives, most of whom are very old and would have no interest in 23 and me. YMMV.

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