Ask HN: Would you trust an ancestry DNA test?
Wonder if they really work and what are the risks with sharing my DNA with a private company.
Any recommendations?
EDIT:
For some context, I am living in the EU.
Any recommendations?
EDIT:
For some context, I am living in the EU.
At an individual level: even if there is no governmental back door, the necessity for a warrant and the criteria to award one scales significantly based on who a person is investigating. If a warrant cannot be awarded against you specifically, lower criteria maybe awarded against relatives. Poor quality assurances could result in contamination of your sample. This is known to have happened in other countries for DNA material. Additionally, geans Express differently due to environmental pressures of an individual. Your DNA can provide information about your socioeconomic background and your upbringing. understanding the threat model of providing your DNA to a private company is important.
On an societal level: DNA is a fingerprint, that at scale can be used to identify protected groups. Providing your DNA allows for scale analysis against known traits of you and your compadres. This enables all sorts of dangerous future sciences. Medical IRBs are usually tasked with specifying their direct application that requires access to medical material. This requirement helps to prevent against arbitrary and scaled surveillance of populations. The private companies are not held to the same standard. You are giving or selling them access to your current expressed genome set.
Finally, a measure against good: private companies for which you give arbitrary data do not have to tell you the consequences of your shared data. There is nothing that requires the company to even do anything with your data. There is also nothing preventing the company from reselling or redistributed your data in many cases. If a company is purchased, terms of service may change from underneath your provided sample. You do not know the applications, nor do you know if there is any measurable benefit.
I would only participate in a program like this if there was a hard specific benefit to my life, and if I was beyond the age of trivial legal in discretions and had no intention of having children.
On the other hand, the way I understood it, is that the more data available, the more accurate are the analysis results.
no, not really.
Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis.
Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies.
I'm not pro/anti 23&Me or anything but it brings an interesting perspective.
In terms of your ancestry: you're probably human, just like me.
Cheers!
I'd also recommend you Google further. There are a multitude of companies in this space. 23&Me is the household name, but if you want more complex to interpret but more detailed data alternatives exist. What's right for you depends on your goals. Hereditary info? Medical?
I'm kind of lucky in that I'm not originally from us and all my family is elsewhere and not interested in ancestry tests.
That said, I think I forgot to opt out from dna tests for my daughter's birth, so I'm probably already out of luck.
If there's no privacy penalty I'd always value knowing myself better.
I Don't trust that organisation as far as I can collectively toss them.