23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline | Hacker News Reader

23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

cnbc.com

389 pointscoloneltcb436 comments

> Wojcicki has theories

Think the obvious one is that the results are shared and whether someone is a criminal or not (or will be one in the future), people are not particularly comfortable with sharing to parties they didn't initially trust it to for the purposes they trusted it for.

Anecdotally, I bought a 23andme kit (just the genealogy one) but never submitted it because the labeling was to send it to the lab in the next town that manages the company I work for's drug screenings. Well, I don't think I have any pre-existing conditions and certainly don't do drugs, but I don't know about any unknowns on the health side that could impact my insurance if they were to share it to the company. Forget that.

Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would've dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it.

You only need these kinds of results once because your DNA doesn't change. I knew people who were giving or had gotten these as gifts, but those are one-off purchases. And if you've heard of people doing it then you'll do it too but that's also a one-off.

I don't think I'd personally benefit because my family came to the US relatively recently from a country that has very few records going back very far, that haven't been destroyed. So what would be the point for me?

I did it 6/7 years ago because the novelty, and enthusiastically recommended it to family and friends. Now I regret doing it considering how Google and Facebook has abused consumer data. I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.

>I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.

You already have since your DNA is out there in a database.

Half of it at least

That's not exactly how DNA works. Their kids should be mostly fine (99.99% similar is still night and day)

IIRC you can request the data to be deleted. You have no way of knowing if it's been done correctly, but at least it's something you could do to prevent your kid's DNA from effectively being there.

I seem to remember reading that even when they delete your data, they keep your sample. So really all it does is prevent you from getting it.

This is definitely worth doing.

It won't protect you from nefarious actors with the data right now, but it will potentially protect you from nefarious actors who may someday get ahold of the db.

I'm similar. My sister pressured me into doing it about 5 years ago. These days, I really regret that I gave in and did it.

Surely most of the interesting stuff would be shared between you and your sister assuming you have both parents the same.

What was your opinion 6/7 years ago about the people raising these concerns? Were you aware back then that sometime in the future you will (probably) regret it?

They already have 1/2 of your kids DNA.

Sure, but the other half could be Martian or Roman God DNA and they'd never know!

If your kids were born in the United States,the states already has their genetic information. https://www.babysfirsttest.org/newborn-screening/states

The US Government already has my DNA thanks to my military service. I very much hope that they aren't sharing it with private companies though. Despite the government having my DNA I would still never give it to 23 and me.

I trust the government more than a for profit corp for this.

That page doesn't say they store it?

In any case, the government having this data and a private, for profit company having this data feels like two quite different things.

Indeed! Nearly every state does a heal prick of newborns and screens their DNA for a host of genetic disorders.

The technology is here now. If a bad actor wants your data they can easily get it without you submitting anything. Unless you protect your bodily fluids I think you should generally already consider your dna compromised.

Since I'm a boring white male who isn't currently angering any "actors" of significant size I'm not too worried about that. I would be much more worried about 23 and me sharing my DNA than James Bond busting through my window and stealing my poop for DNA.

TIL: A handful of opt-in companies can test DNA, ergo, all DNA is compromised so just roll over.

Presumably someone will be following behind me next week to hoover up any bodily fluids I leave when I get Starbucks, and on my way home from the gym.

Not to worry, it’s a bit doubtful submitting DNA samples isn’t going to be obligatory at some point in the future. You can easily solve a lot of crimes with that.

Your kids can also be identified from your DNA.

That's not quite true. Your DNA doesn't change, but 23andMe only does partial sequences on those test kits. As new techniques become available they can't necessarily retest old samples, so customers who want more complete results in the future will likely have to buy and submit new kits.

I've never seen them push that as a marketing angle.

As a 23andMe customer from a couple years ago, it never even occured to me to try re-running the results.

I expect that this is a difficult thing to market, since most people probably don't realize that the thing they did wasn't a "complete" sequence.

"Remember the thing we sold you before? Well, it wasn't that great. But now it is. Give us more money?"

They do, it depends how far back you signed up I guess. I did this many years ago, around the time they first launched and I got constant reminders that this or that new information is not available for me unless I upgrade to their latest chip. I think once I was able to upgrade by having them rerun the first sample I submitted, but at this point I think I’d have to send a new sample in if I remember the message correctly. But that seems like too much hassle so I haven’t done it.

I recently got an email or other notification of some sort offering a discount to get retested with their new V4 chip, as apparently my tests were run on V3.

This is true but unrelated to their current decline in sales since this isn't an option they currently offer.

It is an option they currently offer.

https://you.23andme.com/chip-upgrade/

New people are being born all the time. There are many industries based around one time purchases. Think appendix removal or weddings (that one may be more than once for some people)

There are many industries based around one time purchases. That doesn't make them immune to booms and busts.

23AndMe saw tremendous growth, both according to the article and my anecdotal experience, but that doesn't mean that the burst they saw was sustainable. It's looking, at least right now, like it's not.

Ah, the lucrative appendix removal industry.

There are 250 000 appendectomies a year in the US, multiplied by 14000 USD => 3.5 billion USD in revenues [1].

[1] https://www.lendingpoint.com/blog/appendectomy-what-it-costs...

Considering the types of cars that surgeons drive, I'd say yes, quite lucrative.

Gifting someone a thing that could be used as a paternity test at a baby shower would be more than a little rude. And presumably if both parents have already done it why would you need to test the baby?

> And presumably if both parents have already done it why would you need to test the baby?

Before all the privacy concerns, I was considering getting my kids tested, even though my wife and I have both done it.

Mainly so that I could see which genes they picked up from each of us and if they got any new mutations.

Also, a situation that might be somewhat niche -- we had IVF, so it is possible there was a mistake in the clinic and the child wasn't made from us. I read too many stories about IVF clinics where the samples were switched by the employees with their own.

Even more mind blowing, through sheer clerical error, the children that came out of my wife could be mine but not hers!

Given that they look like us we're pretty sure the clinic didn't screw up, and at this point I would keep them regardless, but if I could discover an IVF mistake, the settlement would make for one heck of a college fund.

It would be extraordinarily rude . But it's definitely not what the parent comment meant. :)

Mutation is a thing.

This sort of thing really makes me wonder whether execs thought about this scenario or not. It seems obvious to me that the novelty could wear off and people stop buying kits. Was it worth the effort and cost to ramp up staffing only to make them redundant?

> Honestly, I would also say that a partial reason why these would've dropped is that everyone who can do it has done it.

In my immediate circle of acquaintances, that doesn't seem to be true. I haven't done it. I'm aware of it, but I've never looked into it, since I've never seen a reason to care.

Very good point, re-sales chances almost zero not allowing for product enhancements perhaps.

I use a blood test service (https://www.getlivesmart.com/) every six months but I can measure changes to my markets based on interventions to my lifestyle that they suggest post GP review. To me that type of service is worth it.

This. Only so many people willing to spend $100 on a novelty purchase, and they do it once

This makes no sense. Most people only go to paris once, of bunjie jump once, or a billion other things. Just because you do it once doesn't mean it is no sustainable.

While I get what you're saying, "most people only go to Paris once" is a very odd analogy to use in this case. Paris may be a tourist destination, but it's not a tourism company. :)

In any case, I think the caveat to what you're saying is that the sustainability of a business proposition that many people only do once (or at least, do comparatively rarely) also has to take into account the cost. Very people take a Jeep tour of the Grand Canyon, but the Jeep tour company is almost certainly a very lean operation compared to 23andMe.

They need a SaaS!

Monthly/yearly subscription to updates of some sort

Monthly/yearly subscription to updates of some sort

And tie it into credit score fear.

"Do you want a higher credit score? Sure, we all do. So be sure your 23andMe DNA is up-to-date!"

That might be workable.

Frankly, I think these mail-in DNA tests are like modern-day phrenology, but you could spin in that "pay us $x per year, and we will analyze your DNA every month once research becomes available".

Pivot into mining all the present data and sell it to the highest bidder if not doing that already.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) specifically prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage or setting rates based on such tests.

You are correct but a major challenge of our time today and the near future is to see whether the rule of law still works against political or financial power. From the 2008 financial crisis onward, there is a growing public sense that the powerful cannot be held subject to justice any more.

I have to say that I personally would never purchase a DNA testing kit for this reason. On the social and political trajectory that I perceive, it might not matter what federal law says, if insurance companies can build a strong enough web of mutual favors with politicians or law enforcement.

> there is a growing public sense that the powerful cannot be held subject to justice any more.

Wrong. Not that they cannot.

Just that they ARE not. That only lasts for so long until people are fed up.

Then, reset.

Life insurance, disability insurance, long-term care insurance etc companies can use genetic data to determine costs for policyholders or to deny coverage[1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/07/6360262...

Companies routinely demonstrate that they're often willing to do prohibited things. And this seems like the sort of thing that would be very hard to prove.

Thank goodness for that. They definitely won't break that law. Nope. Corporations don't do that.

When it's in their financial interest, they will avoid doing things that cost them money. Lawsuits are one such cost. Which is why companies train interviewers not to ask any information that laws prevent them from using during the hiring process. If you don't know, clearly you didn't use that info for discriminatory hiring practices.

Similarly, there was a very recent article about how GINA might be acting as a privacy law, since companies would prefer just not to know:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/genetic-bia...

But then, there's about zero useful information in genetic information when it comes to hiring. If there were useful information, I'm sure we'd see far more violations.

I'm far more concerned about access to life insurance, which is not covered by GINA.

Also, it's very unlikely that a 23andMe type test will have enough clinical information that would be useful even for life insurance purposes or health insurance purposes. Clinical genetic testing is far more powerful that way.

Which is why companies train interviewers not to ask any information that laws prevent them from using during the hiring process.

And yet it happens all the time. All. The. Time.

If it didn't we wouldn't spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on enforcement agencies and lawsuits.

It doesn't matter how many laws are passed, companies are still run by people. And people do bad things, either knowingly or unknowingly or just because they can.

That is true as long as the cost of lawsuits is higher than the potential gain from breaking the law.

Companies knowingly break the law all the time, reek in profit and send out an army of lawyers to pay some minuscule fine that doesn't impact their bottom line.

Fines that don't threaten to break a companies business are just ignored and basically written off as operating costs.

Thank goodness for that. They definitely won't break that law. Nope. Corporations don't do that.

"We're sorry. We can do better. How about we help write a law that regulates us?"

I'm far from an expert, but it also sounds like something that could violate HIPAA.

Legislation can be changed. Including retroactively.

"move fast and break things"

Exactly. Many people naively thought that it was going to be positive. Build your family tree, get better ancestry information.

Even finding family relations can be fraught with issues like illegitimate children, sperm donors who thought they’d remain anonymous, secret affairs now outed and then there is the other health data aspect...

On CBS Sunday Morning this past weekend Steve Hartman had a piece about a 23andMe-style test let him know his parents weren't his parents and his family tree is actually a shrub that grew on the wrong side of the tracks.

Being Steve, the story was told in an awww, shucks Ron Howard style with a happy ending, but I found it kind of disturbing.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro is a recent book that explores these themes.

https://danishapiro.com/books/inheritance/

Some of those are evil secrets. Cheaters ought to be exposed. Living a lie is a terrible way to live.

Yeah, I don't feel at all bad about cheaters being exposed. But, children that result from that cheating... if you grew up thinking that your dad is your dad and then find out from a dna test that he isn't, that can really shake a person. And it's not from anything the child had any control over.

I don't know about 23andme, but I have read Privacy Policies of similar services in the past and they are all riddled with legalese and unclear phrasing that make using the service a complete no-go for me.

Also note that if the policy seems clear you have to follow and read the PP's of their partners and 3rd-parties, and then their partners, etc.

IANAL and you should be before bestowing your trust in such service, unless you don't mind having your DNA profile out in the open.

> Well, I don't think I have any pre-existing conditions and certainly don't do drugs, but I don't know about any unknowns on the health side that could impact my insurance if they were to share it to the company. Forget that.

In the US, only health insurance companies are not allowed to use genetic data to increase premiums or deny coverage, at least for now. I'm not sure what the rules are about using data derived from genetic data, however.

Life insurance, disability insurance, long-term care insurance etc companies are allowed to use genetic data to determine costs for policyholders or to deny coverage[1], however.

That fact alone is the reason I won't hand over my genetic data to a third party.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/07/6360262...

The problem is that... people/companies sometimes do things even if they are illegal.

I agree, this is definitely something to worry about. The reason I brought it up wasn't to dismiss such worries, but to highlight the fact that even if someone isn't worried about the health insurance aspect today, they definitely should worry about how the collection of their genetic data could impact their ability to purchase other types of insurance.

While you may or may not have trust in the US government protecting your rights, there was a law passed years ago that somewhat addresses your concern.

GINA (Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-110s358rs/pdf/BILL...

I also bought a 23 and me test, but I intend on submitting mine with some DNA recovered from a Mummy or something like that.

For people glad that "crimes will be solved", must be noted that criminals could use it in their benefit also. Just submitting a strange DNA, from a deceased people for example, to be linked with their name. That would taint the database, make they invisible to computers searching (dead people don't commit crimes) and send the hounds far away eventually. If caught you can always blame the lab for mixing your data.

Looks like the modern equivalent to having a new identity after a fake new ID card.

Dang good call. Gonna order up a kit and throw some random homeless persons spit/hair in it

I wanted to buy one for a while, and my girlfriend offered to get me one for Christmas, but this is the reason I didn't.

When 23andme first started they were offering that a sample and your data could be destroyed whenever you liked. Then they got bought and their erasure document is a disgrace, their default position is they can't delete your genetic data and they don't say a thing about the sample at all. Those were not the terms under which it was collected.

There is a reason their business is failing and its because of this enormous change to their basic policy. What they have changed to is against the law in the EU and it is definitely not GDPR compliant despite the amount they say it is in their document.

I just sent in my spit last week and I thought they were very transparent about their data protections. They allow for you to delete your data and deny access by third parties, albeit they require 30 days to process any changes. I'm interested in learning more about my heritage, as well as contributing to genetics research. Maybe their terms have changed over time, but overall I found their explanations to be clear and thorough.

No, that's the obvious "reason that you think should matter but doesn't".

> and certainly don't do drugs

What about alcohol or caffeine?

Actually neither. Family history with alcohol, burned out on coffee as a kid (would drink it at my grandparents' house pretty regularly), and sodas I kicked a couple years ago because it was starting to burn when drinking some of the stronger ones (my fault. Consumed it like it was water.)

But fair point, I didn't consider that when saying drugs. Meant more along the lines of drugs that work could come down on me for (marijuana and up. Personally, I think if alcohol and cigarettes are legal, so too should marijuana, but the legalization of it wouldn't change my non-use of it. Just seems a stupid prohibition to have within the context.).

Since when do they test for those in insurance related drug screenings?

Current, unaffected employee here. Throwaway for obvious reasons.

A big chunk of the layoff is the new lab that we built in Phoenix. That only made economic sense in the scenario where we were selling far more kits than we succeeded in selling.

The rest of the layoffs have a similar root cause: a massive overestimate of how much we were going to sell.

I'd blame the shortfall on some combination of growing privacy concerns from customers, failure to understand the demand elasticity as we cut back on discounts, maybe some slowing of consumer discretionary spending, and maybe saturating the market.

Ancestry.com has also stepped up its marketing game. Used to be a follower with DNA, now a leader, and discounting heavily.

And, unlike 23andMe which got rid of family tree tools used by genealogists, Ancestry still has a very strong suite of trees and traditional genealogy tools. Some people really want to have both genetic and traditional genealogy accounts under the same provider, and are either unaware or don't really care about the privacy concerns.

One thing I would add is the data for places outside of Europe looks pretty weak for both Ancestry.com and 23AndMe, at least it was the last time I looked. If you are from European descent they can practically tell you what village your ancestors are from (how accurate that is I don't know) but if you are Asian about the best you get is yep, you're Asian! I married into an Asian family and the reports I've seen from Asian family members are pretty disappointing compared to what I've seen from my family members (white, European descent). I imagine it's similar for some other non-white races too, that's a big demographic that's being missed.

Perhaps its changed since you looked because my fiancee is Latin American and her results tell her the provinces/areas of her home country where her extended family is originally from.

> If you are from European descent they can practically tell you what village your ancestors are from (how accurate that is I don't know)

Can confirm it was accurate for me based on my own impression of family history, I found it pretty impressive.

My ancestry is from Lithuania and two different parts of Italy.

Lithuania is a small country but they identified my grandparents' county correctly.

In Italy, 2 of the regions that I know I have roots from are in spots #1 and #3. The third one is #8.

This was my main reason for not doing it as well, until I got it as a gift. Still waiting on results, though I expect to be disappointed.

Lol $199 - yup you're Asian. Thanks!

Just tried to buy a kit, their checkout page after creating an account is blocked because it's trying to load a flash object.

And competition - I purchased and ran a 23andme test ~10 years ago and it seemed magical that this was something that could be done. Now there are 3-5 others who do the same thing (at least in a consumer's eyes) and it's unclear what the uniqueness of 23andme is.

What the company to be so off with demand estimates?

Would the company have been in ok shape if they would have set lower estimates? Or was that target needed for other reasons?

Why would you build a completely separate lab in Phoenix?

> Wojcicki has theories, but she doesn’t have clear proof for why consumers are shying away from getting tests

Because the ones that want them have gotten them and there's no reason to ever buy the product again once you've done it once.

I mean, smartphones are great, but the market for them would have hit a wall pretty quickly if no one ever had a reason to replace them after buying their first.

I mean, there's the fact that companies like this also provide your data to DNA databases that governments and other companies have access too. That seems like a good reason to shy away from getting their tests done.

Yeah, who know's what happens to the data after it leaves you. I know I seen on the news the military was advising against it, I guess if your DNA was leaked in a data breach someone could create viruses that target specific people, sounds far fetched like out of a science fiction movie though so not sure how realistic but I guess in theory it could happen. But ironically, many states like California collect newborn babies blood at the hospital after birth and stores them - even selling some samples to outside researchers, which is true if you look it up but if you tell people that they think you are some conspiracy theory tinfoil hat wearing nutcase instead of doing their own research rather they just attack you, not sure if parents are even aware. Looks like they are supposed to be informed, but the state isn't sure if that happens always by the doctors or nurses at the hospital. Wouldn't surprise me if it's just a small sign on the wall somewhere no one notices.

I have been wanting to though do one of those DNA tests but never got around to it since didn't want to spend the money right now and the whole privacy thing. I never knew my real dad, so I was kinda curious. Then on the other side of the family originally came from the South like Alabama or Tennessee and then before the US Germany but who knows if true just what I've been told by some family, but they very well could be wrong. I'm not sure how true or detailed those reports are either from these DNA test companies.

Smart phones also leak data. While you didn't mean this, I do think there's some sympathy here - the people that don't care about their data being out there because they 'have nothing to hide' probably feel the same way with their genetic data being out there.

23andME need to figure out a follow-on product to get the folks that have already taken the base test to purchase. Otherwise they have no new market to address.

That’s exactly why I’ll never use them.

I sent a saliva swab and got my dna analyzed by 23andme. I got back information I already knew such as where I came from etc.

Serious question. IF the government catches a relative of mine who is a rapist or a murderer from my dna, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Could someone please explain what could go wrong. Keeping our community from heinous criminals is a good thing isn’t?

ah, here we go. The notoriously flawed "I'm doing nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide" argument.

There are so many reasons why this is wrong and it is a pretty well known philosophical stance. A couple reasons:

- You assume that the government is acting for your best interest. What would happen if we elect a crazy president that changes the direction of the country? (Think WW2 Germany with their eugenics). - You are not doing anything wrong but don't you have information that you want to keep private? Getting an STD for example is not illegal but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like that medical information available after a search with your name on Google.

> Keeping our community from heinous criminals is a good thing isn’t?

Yes, but there certainly is a cost to doing that, and at some point the cost outweighs the benefits. If that weren't true, then the argument could be used to insist that every place, including every room in your home, should be subjected to government surveillance 24 hours a day.

Forensic genealogy isn't perfect. There are a few different kinds of DNA tests and comparisons, and some of those are better than others, and which one is used and how the DNA is collected and the interpretation of the results is still left up to human beings with badges, so it's still error-prone. This has led to people being wrongly accused, and even convicted, of serious crimes:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/genetic-genealogy-can-h...

https://gizmodo.com/when-bad-dna-tests-lead-to-false-convict...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/forensics-gone-wrong...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-m...

The problem here is that DNA evidence is currently considered infallible by law enforcement and jurors, so very nearly no amount of contradictory evidence will get you off the hook if a DNA test matches you to a cold case.

Yeah, but that has nothing to do with the decline. Normal people don't care.

And then there's the fact that if your parents did it, why would you do it? My parents did it so now I have exactly zero reason to do it myself.

Also all the negative publicity behind data being sold, which should surprise nobody.

That isn't really true though. You aren't some kind of clone of your parents. Imagine that both of your parents sit down at a table. Each one has 100 dominoes in front of them. Each parent will randomly take 50 of their dominoes and put them in the center of the table. Those are your 100 dominoes. It could be that your mother has 20 "scottish" dominoes, but not a single one of those dominoes are in the set given to you. You might look at your mother's dna results and say "I'm 20% scottish!" No you're not. You got zip from the scottish side of the family.

With 23 pairs of chromosomes we have 46 dominoes each (ignoring recombination.) This changes the odds of inheriting none of your mother's Scottish dominoes from 1 in a million (2^20) to 1 in 512 (2^9).

> This changes the odds of inheriting none of your mother's Scottish dominoes from 1 in a million (2^20) to 1 in 512 (2^9).

That may be true for mom, but conservatively, there's between a 1-in-100 and 1-in-20 odds of inheriting none of your father's dominoes.

Right, but unless you get your own results you have no idea how the dice rolled for you (how many other game metaphors can I use?).

that line of reasoning sort of proves the uselessness of even using 23andMe in the first place

No, all it means is you can't look at someone else's results (even parents or siblings) and think that your results would be the same.

>You might look at your mother's dna results and say "I'm 20% scottish!" No you're not. You got zip from the scottish side of the family.

So then the DNA results themselves are wrong since they're based on exactly this logic, just for your parents...

Therefore making the entire thing completely useless.

It would still provide information about health, since you don't inherit all of your parents' alleles. (For example, if your parents are heterozygous for an allele and you'd like to know your status.)

Because you can have a mutation that your parents don't have?

23&me most like will not help you there as they are only looking for relatively well known mutations and not de-novos. They are basically scanning a few (or less) million variants but there are billions of possible new ones

23andme is pretty useless for getting great information from your DNA. I say this because you can get a much better report by exporting the raw data and then ordering a more detailed report from promethase.

Yes, but if you get a mutation in one of the SNPs they test for, it will show positive even though both parents are negative.

Not just that, but when you read about them, they pretty much host their data on law enforcement hardware. Not that I think the Golden State Killer should be on the lam, but it's kind of concerning that a person with whom you share a great-grandparent with can put you in a police dragnet.

This keeps coming up by people who are seemingly confusing 23andme with GedMatch. They are very different platforms, and even the latter has greatly changed their law enforcement policies.

23andme requires a warrant. They publish a transparency report and since 2015 they've gotten a grand total of 7.

Having said that, if my DNA catches a distant relative who commits severe crimes, that hardly discourages me.

As an aside, what's with the bizarre moderation of HN lately? The circle of users allowed to downvote has gotten perhaps a little too big as the utilization for noting "this does not conform with my biases" has turned absolutely Reddit-like.

The parent post is wrong about 23andme -- it doesn't matter if you like the company or not, their point is wrong -- and the notion that you're caught up in a "dragnet" because of a far off ancestor committed a crime implies that you think the people who do genetic ancestry are idiots.

You may be technically correct, but the complaint is just a facet of the deeper (more real) issue: people want to own and control their data and they increasingly do not trust other parties. Even if 23&Me requires a warrant rather than a suppoena that's just nuance lost in a haze of "the customer is the product" exploitation that consumers hate yet feel forced to accept just like "click through" legalese.

> This keeps coming up by people who are seemingly confusing 23andme with GedMatch. They are very different platforms, and even the latter has greatly changed their law enforcement policies.

This confusion matters if the average customer is making decisions based on that info. It doesn't matter (yet?) that they require a warrant and are transparent. All that matters is that enough people believe 23andme will share personal data for sales to be affected

I would expect it to matter on HN. Facts matter. Increasingly people are just saying entirely wrong, easily disproven things and because it sounds right to whatever the bias of the crowd is, it's accepted.

However I doubt that angle has any relevance to their sales decline, beyond the most fringe element. As others have rightly said, the majority of people who have an interest in the information that 23andme offers have already done it or a competitor, having probably picked it up over one of the multiple Prime Days, etc. They do have revisions of their chip and improved information, but thus far they haven't marketed that for repurchases.

> you think the people who do genetic ancestry are idiots.

I've seen anonymous but redacted proof-bearing confessions from people these companies saying they "fuck with pure white people" by throwing in random ethnicities, so...at minimum, not all of them respect the integrity of their work.

Which shouldn't surprise anyone, due to...them being humans.

It sounds like you read an absurd fan fiction. The notion is absolutely ludicrous for a variety of reasons that are too boring to get into here, but it is absolutely remarkable the nonsense parroted about 23andme on HN.

Sad news for you endorphone: you're a 100% match for a serial killer based on the limited analysis and shoddy lab work that contaminated your 23andme sample. Here's a court order requiring you to submit a new sample to us. We're also going to need your passport so cancel that vacation you had planned.

This is somewhat of a misconception. The variants they test for change over time as new biologically significant SNPs and haplotypes are discovered.

One of the things that is a little misleading about how they present results is that a "negative" result means they don't know (i.e. not one of the SNPs they test for) rather than you have a "normal" copy of some particular gene.

> there's no reason to ever buy the product again once you've done it once

Actually I did it once about 10 years ago, and since then they've added a bunch of new diagnostic analyses they will perform, including a couple that are relevant to my family and I've been tempted to do it all again.

(although wait, do they need more saliva, or do they just re-run my existing sample?)

As far as I know they do need a new sample of saliva because they don't store the ones they already analyzed.

There's room for new products/features. They already offer a second more expensive tier that includes more medical related information. As they do more association tests and the like they'll probably be able to tell people more and more based on their dna.

Right. From the product development side, what else is there? Upsell on newer test results? Sell you your genetic code as a poster?

How come people usually only go to driving school once and these schools still make a living?

Simple: they're not venture-backed so no one is expecting billions from them.

23andMe could be a longer-term sustainable business but taking $700m from investors means you must keep growing even if there's no really opportunity for growth.

driving schools likely have far more customers, a constant influx of customers based on age, and driving (in the US at least) is a necessity, and thus supplies the market. I'm also just spit-balling here: the cost of a tech company's upkeep is FAR MORE than that of a driving school's

Sharing DNA data with cops, after the fact surely doesn't help

The real risk in my mind is that this opens market space for Beijing-backed companies like Novogene in Sacramento. They will occupy that space and every adjacent space as fast as they can. They'll sequence your tumor genetics, or your germline to get a better read on you're kid's inherited disease. And you'll never know it because your doctor contracted with them, they signed a BAA (so it's all legal, right). And then Novogene will take that BAA to the bathroom, piss on it, and send your genome to China for cross-referencing in Face++ and see if you have any Uigher in you.

Everyone will eventually get some amount of sequencing done, probably multiple times throughout their lives. The vastly more important question in my mind is who's going to do it, and what are their incentives?

With cost-conscious medical professionals, you can bet it will be the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder will not have your best interests in mind.

This wild, unfounded fantasy completely misses the point: genetic privacy is fundamentally unlike other types of private information. It is trivially easy for someone to collect your genetic information if they really want to, completely legally and without your consent. They could, for example, obtain bits of the multitude of genetic material you spread around your environment simply by existing -- chewing gum, hair, cigarette butts, poop. Or, just look at a few close relatives of yours who overshared everything on some online database. And these are just the obvious ways.

this is why there needs to be laws about using and transferring information about you (biological or not). Regulation, and transparency prevents abuses.

If your sample was tested for trace genetic traits you didn't ask for, you have avenues to pursue if laws exists, but right now no such avenues are available.

This "China = boogeyman" has become very common on HN and I'm surprised it's rarely called out for the xenophobia it represents. For most of the rest of the world, the US is not much more trustworthy than China, but Americans generally frame it as if control is transferring from some guardian angel to a horned devil.

I'm well aware of the horrors of the Chinese govt, but it's always talked about here as if a fresh new threat has appeared, rather than the source changing from West to East.

This is true, however, please note that nobody except maybe your family will have your best interest in mind.

I did this almost 8 years ago for the health insights and recommended it to a few dozen friends and family because the UI was nice, they added new reports, and they were the only low cost provider at the time that let me export my data. I loved the service and found an unknown sibling through the site.

The FDA made them remove health insights so that made the service less useful.

But two years ago they started selling data to pharmaceuticals. They claim it is opt in, but I have a hard time believing them. And they prompt me to opt in about once a month. I no longer recommend.

> The FDA made them remove health insights so that made the service less useful.

This is like saying a medical product is less useful because the FDA made it remove horoscopes.

If the health insights aren't proven to be accurate, they aren't either safe or useful.

My ex is a quantitative geneticist and always said that we know almost nothing about genetics, and these companies are vastly inflating the certainty anyone has about their conclusions.

Not really, what they did is basically summarize all the various research related to genes. It was mildly useful, but more so as just a way to easily have some surveillance as new research came out.

You may argue that it’s not useful, but saying it’s not safe is hyperbole as there is no evidence of danger or misuse and there’s been like 10-15 years for horror stories to come up.

I would like some way to automate my scanning of research for genes related to me. 23andme sort of does this again, but for years they didn’t.

> saying it’s not safe is hyperbole

It absolutely is not hyperbole.

Any test that leads to unnecessary treatment is unsafe. That list typically includes anything with false positives. For example, excessive testing for certain cancers (like breast cancer) lead to higher death rates.

Here's a concrete example where poorly-understood genetic testing has led to unnecessary surgery, which is obviously not safe.

https://www.webmd.com/breast-cancer/news/20170412/misunderst...

> Any test that leads to unnecessary treatment is unsafe.

The AMA argues against letting patients run their own lab tests too, and fortunately lost. While it is possible that people could make mistakes using their own data, but this is rare and certainly the data being available is a net positive for people.

Using your definition, wouldn’t it be more dangerous to only make the information available to rich people and prevent the information being available affordable? $100 for webmd is much cheaper than the tens of thousands it would cost to consult with specialists, counselors, and gps.

We need to look for ways to lower healthcare costs, not scare people about hypothetical dangers that just happen to be solved by very expensive tests and consults.

> The FDA made them remove health insights so that made the service less useful.

I believe there are third-party sites that will still give you this information if you upload your raw data. Though of course, this has the downside of giving yet another party access to your data.

The 3rd party sites I've used don't ask for any identifying information though (unless you want to pay for paid features), it wouldn't surprise me if there were simply downloaded freeware that you could use to do it offline on a virtual machine if you even wanted.

A quick Google query leads me to this

>I recently wrote a small tool, Snappy, that can help you browse and interpret your raw data. Written in JavaScript, all processing is done on your browser, without transmitting sensitive data to any server. That also enables the tool to be used offline

https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/comments/6troyj/wrote_a_new...

So it does appear there are some sort of offline solutions for further exploring your raw data.

Cool, thanks!

I used to use promethese, but they recently sold out.

I’m curious for the reasoning behind why selling the data to big pharma is a bad thing? I was thrilled to hear about that personally as I am very supportive of large pools of genetic data being harnessed for drug research. Big pharma has big money and lots of smart folks, if they can leverage 23&me’s data to create better drugs or find the root cause behind diseases, it seems like a win to me.

That said, I hope that we pass stronger laws protecting genetic data from being used for any type of insurance. Genetics =/= genetic expression, and the law should reflect that.

I don’t like my data used without consent. I don’t like my data passing through extra companies forever and dna is or will be always identifiable since it’s like, my dna.

I also don’t like the idea of companies making money off my data without compensating me.

They sold 10M kits, and they primarily market in the US. DNA never changes, so you have a lifetime max of 1 purchase of 23andMe per lifetime. Their competitors have likely sold 15-30M as well, so maybe 30-40M of these kits have been sold. That's 10% of US market.

What's the max conceivable penetration here? 20%?

It occurs to me that they could have followed the software trend where everything is a subscription service. As more is learned from the genome, they can deliver more value to the customers over time.

Yeah, it seems like a major mistake to sell this as a one-time purchase. Market it as "genetic monitoring" Charge a monthly or yearly fee to keep getting new genetic insights as research discovers the function of more mutations. Offer upsell re-tests with more complete or accurate sequencing.

I think they must have been banking on the data-set itself being highly valuable and made the tests cheap, then ran out of customers on both ends of the equation.

GMAAS

I believe they actually did have it as a subscription model at one point (I think it was at a time that it was a choice of either $400 one-time, or $99 for the kit + extra for the subscription), but I guess they have more competition now, plus it's cheaper?

they already provide this as a service

It's a bit of novelty act right now. Like I know pretty well what my ancestry is and it isn't terribly relevant to my daily life as-is. If these guys told me I was actually part Cherokee or something unexpected, I'd shrug and continue doing what I'm doing.

Your germ line genome rarely changes. Your exome changes all the time. Your gut biome changes all the time. There's massive market opportunity but a ton of regulations around how to tap into that market opportunity.

On a separate note, Ancestry is going through a similar issue. They've had double digit revenue declines in their DNA testing suite. The truth around 23andMe and Ancestry is that they're really doing a super shallow sequencing and, I believe, are doing only genotyping. It's not super interesting in the long run because it's such a static dataset. Getting to exomic or metabolic/gut biome sequencing provides much more interesting insights into the human body.

Several things are wrong with this post. The exome is the protein coding portion of the genome. It does not change except by somatic mutation, same as the rest of the genome. Genotyping is the act of decoding variants in a genome and does not have anything to do with the underlying technology used. To my knowledge both ancestry and 23andme still rely on microarrays to do genotyping, though 23andme experimented with whole exome sequencing (which is not low coverage) in the past.

> Your exome changes all the time.

I work in DNA analysis (not for 23andme). Citation needed.

> Your gut biome changes all the time.

Your gut biome isn't being tested by a genetics company collecting your saliva or epithelial cells.

How complete are theses tests? If I wait another 10, 15 years to get sequenced, would I get more accurate, reliable information? Can advances in sequencing technology make it worth people to get resampled? Or is it just an issue of better analysis?

Your exome is a subset of your genome. It does not change. That said, the cheap DNA kits do not test your entire exome, so there will be a market for these once they are able to do so.

Exome could plausibly change due to alternative splicing, but my guess is that what is meant here is transcriptome, which is which genes are actually transcribed and their quantities.

Unfortunately RNA is chemically unstable. Not sure if cDNA synthesis could be done with a consumer kit.

Gut biome population sequencing/gene panels probably easier to get.

> "Your gut biome changes all the time."

I don't think "mail us your poop" will ever be more than a niche.

Commercial DNA testing companies use microarrays, which are cheap but only see common variation.

DNA sequencing is more expensive but can find all variation, including the very rare ones (eg only in your family)

Yes, but they use a monthly subscription payment model so they should have a recurring income stream from all those users.

Has anyone read their "research consent"?

https://www.23andme.com/en-int/about/consent/

"If your data are associated with your identity, they may be made public or released to insurance companies, which could have a negative effect on your ability to obtain insurance coverage."

This is about data breach but within, they acknowlidge the potential usability of those data for insurance bussiness. I wonder who would buy them if they go down...

Is there any way to prevent them from using it for that purpose or to determine if my insurance company has access and is using it?

If you are in EU you can send them GDPR request, for who are they sharing with and request for deletion. For states, i doubt you have any choice.

I just wonder what happens to everyone's DNA data as the company faces financial trouble and/or sells itself. That's in addition to any concerns about possible security breaches that might occur.

This is an important question. Ancestry, for example, has been taking on debt to pay dividends at the behest of its majority shareholder.

Source?

Sold to the highest bidder...

I think that's already happened and now they're out of ways to monetize further.

Which contributes to why sales declined.

Enough people have had their awkward family gatherings after trying to have fun with a novelty gift.

Enough people have watched others mess up otherwise cohesive family structures over what was supposed to be a novelty toy.

Enough people have watched the availability for genetic information to go to law enforcement. And that maybe they don't need your specific information to use that effectively, so why give more whether you agree with it or disagree with it.

And the uncertainty of this information being stored in perpetuity, available to the highest bidder.

Interestingly it also got Elizabeth Warren in hot water and accused of normalizing race science by interpreting her test as proof of ethnicity.

Not much wonder. Focus more energy on ways to monetize the DNA they have already collected?

Maybe the industry as a whole should stop handing stuff over to law enforcement and governments.

I was going to buy it for 2 different people for christmas but both declined over privacy concerns as they read in the news they are being used in sweeping investigations. Given the number of wrongful accusations that litter history and the general trend away from any regard for privacy among security agencies this is a very legitimate concern, even for regular folks like my parents.

> Maybe the industry as a whole should stop handing stuff over to law enforcement and governments.

They can try saying "No", then the government will just get a court order to force them to do it. They don't really have a choice in the end – the only choice they have is whether they make it easy for the government ("you want our data? here have it!") or slightly harder ("I'll need to see a warrant first..." "No problem, we are going to the magistrate right now to get one...")

The companies like 23andMe can do anonymous tests. They can even sell "gift cards" for cash (or bitcoin, for digitally inclined). Don't deliver kits, let them be picked up without asking for an ID, just by the gift card number. As long as the test results are not linked to a specific address or name, it's fine.

They will still have clues about the state and the city and the IP address of the person. It's enough to do whatever research they may want to do with aggregate data. It's not good enough to sell this data to insurance companies and advertisers.

Companies could stop retaining data that governments would be interested in. I'd love to get my genome sequenced, but I never want that data to be retained by anyone but me.

Until they get ordered to retain that data.

I did it and then regretted it. Possible outcomes:

You risk getting linked to a crime because your DNA was found at the scene of the crime. You might even be innocent, but just having your DNA in a database increases your risk of a false conviction. Worse, you put your relatives at risk too, regardless of whether they are guilty or not.

Maybe you unknowingly got someone pregnant and now owe child support. Depending on your situation, you may not welcome this discovery.

Best case, you find out that you have a genetic disease that you can't do much about.

DNA testing still isn't ready for general use, giving conflicting / arbitrary results: https://www.healthista.com/dna-genetic-test-review-three-dif...

I'm guessing it's the trough of disillusionment in the hype cycle, and DNA testing will suddenly get really popular in a few years.

or they miss-estimated their market size and growth. I don't think most people care about DNA testing.

when they started, you could get your results anonymously. I recommended several friends to try. Then they changed that policy...at which point I stopped recommending it.

I'm not saying this is the cause, but they had a chance to be good guys and decided against it.

or it's already covered by healthcare when a doctor suspects it's necessary (for genetic predispositions).

And there's basically zero overlap between 23andMe's test method and the clinically useful tests that a doctor would order.

For example, carrier screening, to see if you and your partner both carry recessive variants that may result in a rare genetic disease in some of your children: impossible with 23andMe's setup, but useful to a huge number of couples, and already common practice for some ethnic groups.

This was way more appealing to me when they were able to provide (probably spurious) medical predictions, and before it was clear that the ancient ancestry assessments were so much guesswork.

The cost of sequencing keeps rapidly halving, but the price of kits isn't really dropping, so over time it seems like less and less of a good value.

They're clearly spending on social features and development, which is understandable, but it'd be interesting to see an alternate universe firm just dedicated to making sequencing as accessible a commodity as possible--send in butterflies or dog hair or sushi and we'll send you a genome.

Might create interesting opportunities for amateur biology, similar to how popular amateur astronomy has become with home telescopes and ability to search Hubble images and such.

I kinda wanted to get one but the privacy concerns and having my data sold/added to a government database scares me.

Almost any other sensitive data (passwords, bank accounts, etc.) can be changed with enough effort, but your genetics can't.

Even if you think 23&Me is operating ethically today or that you trust the laws protecting your privacy once your genetic data is leaked there's nothing you can do about it.

Knowing your DNA is basically is a sell-through for these test kit companies makes this is a nonstarter for me.

I happily share my income and net worth figures online, post here and everywhere using my real name, and I’m even doing a podcast now sharing all the gory details of going through fertility treatment from the male perspective.

There’s no way in the world I would allow a company, or any other person or entity, to voluntarily have my DNA.

If it could be bought somewhere with only a big QR code one it and prepaid stamped envelope, I might buy it abroad, spit into it, seal it, send it and check results over Tor later.

you can buy it on Amazon or I also saw the kits at Target - pay with cash if extra paranoid. use a vpn, don't give your real name or real address. it's some work but it's doable if you want to.

Probably a good thing. Since they started cooperating with law enforcement, it's basically a giant exercise is entrapment with a little psudo science to help sell it...

Do you have any examples of this?

From what I've read, they've found criminals using relatives' DNA test data, but that wasn't the evidence used to convict.

> The company raised ample venture capital -- $786 million, according to Crunchbase

If I might go on a tangent, isn't that an insane amount of money for the VCs to hand out? Apple with a $1 trillion market capitalization (the most valuable company on Earth until Saudi Aramco beat the record a month ago) began with $1M in inflation-adjusted venture funding in 1977.

Is there any way that $786M makes sense or is there just too much VC money sloshing around?

Could it be that there are a lot more VCs, especially in tech field now a days than in 1977?

“This has been slow and painful for us,”

I'm gonna give you some slack here, Anne, but TBH Silicon Valley executives don't really understand what these words mean.

“I think the tech world needs to own this[sic] better communicate privacy standards to build trust,” she said. “I want to jump in and really own it.”

Or maybe instead of jumping in with your billionaire executive pants on, Anne, you could listen. People are sick of being told what's being done to them. You didn't miscommunicate, you screwed up. People are pissed off.

>Wojcicki has theories

I have a theory for her. It's too expensive. It was really cheap when I got it (on deep discount) but there are discounts, and then there are discounts. The discounts in the last few years have been very weak.

For the past few years I would have bought it for as many as five family members if only it had gone back to the price I got it for.

And now that the privacy concerns have understandably scared everyone, maybe privacy has overtaken that theory. But the prices are still too high for the value offered.

I saw one of the kits on sale in Rite-Aid the other day, and I looked at it, and it was only like $35 dollars. That's down in the "sure, what the hell, maybe it'd be interesting" range. Then I looked closer, and realized that in the fine print that was just for the testing kit. When you send it in and get it processed, there was an additional $99-150ish lab processing fee, depending on what you picked, to actually get the results back. A little rich for my blood at that price.

I know this has been essentially stated already, but: DUH.

The moment they let anyone have access to that information, they soured the market.

The “least morally questionable” risk is accidentally handing distant cousins over to police, and most people aren’t even comfortable with that.

Everyone paying attention the pattern of layoffs? Ebay, Mozilla, DigitalOcean, 23andMe, Intel...

Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.

None of these are likely the result of systemic factors. If anything, there being layoffs at some firms without it impacting general employment levels is a sign of a healthy and balanced economy.

Is the intuition on credit card debt just that unemployment can jeopardize your ability to make payments?

You're going to have to prove there's a pattern here. Unless the pattern is companies that haven't maintained their status in their respective industries.

> Pay down your credit card debt and make sure you have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank, if you're young and haven't been through this before.

If you think you're about to get sacked, the last thing to do is pay down debt regardless of the interest rate.

If you're about to get sacked, I'd recommend opening a home equity line of credit. You can live off this while you plot your next move.

People's heads are in the clouds again, ala 1999 and 2008. You can't believe people are delivering anything more than hopes and dreams unless you lay eyes on said product. Most these startups sell hype and vaporware, but people get starry-eyed over them and turn into Phil "Take My Money" Fry. Cynicism isn't a bad thing when it comes to money.

Papyrus is closing 200+ retail stores, Express is closing retail stores...the retail apocalypse growing every day too.

Always wise. Also a good idea to remember that there are a large number of software jobs outside of big name tech.

Also, there have been a few rather defensive sounding VC posts on HN lately. Usually it's all Techbro Tony Robbins platitudinal stuff, but it's been getting darker these days. Did you see the one with Paul Graham lashing out at "haters" or whatever? Yikes. Gives a sense things aren't going that well, and they want to justify their decisions.

Moreover, I'm getting less recruiter spam on LinkedIn, but to be fair half of that was just WeWork.

I was thinking the same thing... the housing market will probably crash soon... bitcoin to the moon? just kidding.

I was very close to buying this a few years ago and I decided against it. Then later it was revealed that these companies give away and sell your data... How surprising. Now I'm too creeped out to care.

A siblings results was enough for me. We share the same ancestry. There were no surprises in their result.

My company has some workplace goals, that if you complete them, you can have some extra time off. Usually they involve taking care of your body and participation is tracked by the honor system.

A recent one had a requirement that was a DNA test "to learn about your heritage." There was an opt out, which I took for privacy reasons. I'm amazed people are just starting to realize the implications of giving away your DNA to be collected in a central database.

I regret doing my 23andMe testing. I stopped trusting them when I realized how easy it would be for bad actors to abuse the system. I wish I could take it back and have them destroy the records and DNA sample but they literally won't let people do that (for some completely bullshit "legal" reason that makes no sense and is clearly a lie).

Where I work in the healthcare area, we are trying to expand from the us into Europe. And interesting legal question is how to honor Europe's right-to-be-forgotten laws with the US's HIPPA requirement to preserve health care data for X years. As an employee it also feels awkward.

That's what they get for only allowing people to pay their way into their ecosystem via a test kit.

Their service would much more useful if they had a larger database of people, but only so many people that have already done a kit through Ancestry DNA are willing to pay for yet another DNA kit through 23andMe to get access to their database of people,a s they already have access to Ancestry's larger database.

More or less 23andMe is starting to hit saturation and need to build their database more if they want to increase usage of their service, get more time on site, and thereby draw existing users towards their current and future monetized offerings. There was one time in there history that they allowed you to import your DNA data for free from other services, but they shut that down long ago.

They are going to face more competition in their once-unique area of DNA health data, as Promethease was just acquired by MyHeritage.

Very curious that this came just a couple weeks after they announced licensing their first drug compound (using data from the test kits?) to the Spanish firm Almirall [0,1].

Anybody have any ideas about this? Why would they slow down the "growth and scaling efforts" (as the cnbc article claims) even despite lower-than expected sales, when the data from kits is what gives them the unique(?) capability to discover novel drug compounds at a massively reduced cost compared to traditional pharma companies.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-09/23andme-l...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22004326

Bringing drugs to market requires a lot of money. And the whole process takes a long time (order of a decade).

Subsidizing the tests or doing more marketing would sell more tests, but wouldn't speed up drug development. And doing so would burn up money that could be used for drug development.

And even though the licensing deal is promising, there has been no drug brought to market yet based on 23andMe's data. So it's a hard sell to investors.

I received Ancestry DNA as a gift this year and have no desire to use it.

After reading the terms and conditions, I was amazed by how much they can share or resell the data. Beyond the privacy issue, I'm also not sure how much these services can add value to my life. Either knowing or not knowing where some of my 2^n ancestors (n being generations from me) are potentially (based on proxy information, not certain) originating from doesn't seem to do much for me.

Also, knowing health risks also doesn't do a whole lot for me as I already live a healthy life with the idea that living healthily will add years to my life. Do I want to know I'm predisposed to some disease in the future? Not really. Unless there are DNA-tailored pills you can take that reverse any potential DNA-driven issues coming my way, I'd rather not know.

Does anyone feel differently? Are they getting value from these services?

After a woman reached out to me on Facebook last Father's Day I took the 23andme test. Yes I had a new to me baby sister!

She found me after taking the test herself looking for her (our) paternal linneage. A not too distant common relative did the 23andme too and a little detective work in online obituaries was all she needed to find me. Strangest FB message I have gotten to date. I thought she was a cybersecurity recruiter as I noticed she was looking at my LinkedIn profile a few days prior to contact.

I used to be more concerned about the privacy implications. Maybe it's my age or something but I feel at peace with my choice. Besides I realized once one somewhat close relative is in the database it takes very little to link us all up.

Was it worth it all things considered? For me it was though without the desire to confirm our relationship I probably wouldn't have done it.

I didn’t buy a test, because my brother did. Why pay $100 to get the same story twice?

I didn't buy the test because all it would say would be "Congrats! You are 100% asian."

I feel like 23&me is literally only useful/interesting to white people because they can see which one of the 50 European countries they have ties to.

It's not that useful for me. I've had friends do it and get 99.97% Chinese or Indian.

Amazing, I could have told you that for free.

> I feel like 23&me is literally only useful/interesting to white people because they can see which one of the 50 European countries they have ties to.

I'm not familiar with the kinds of ancestry information they can provide, but why would that only apply to white people? Why not also, say, people with African heritage and which of the African countries they have ties to?

As a 3rd generation white person in the US, what specific European ancestry I have is meaningless to me.

I find the health tests to be more interesting than the ancestry, though it was a bit scary though having to click through all the warnings to get to the results.

> what specific [ancestry] I have is meaningless to me.

it's ultimately probably not important, but I would think that it's at least something to be curious about.

It probably would have been different, based on other stories of twins that have been on hackernews or siblings in other news reports (the % ethnic background should be considered a guestimate) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18938750

Although it would be funny if your results were different than your brother's.

... and if you got a different story, you might wish you hadn't spent $100...

Surprised they haven't expanded the offering to include regular blood panels and "doctor's recommendations" (subscription revenue). Hell, you could even do a "improve your bloodline" service that plainly explains how doing a, b, and c will help with that and set you on a life plan w/ decade-level health targets.

I'd have to imagine a well-packaged, boutique option for getting that done would be huge (and they'd have most of the infrastructure and relationships to do it). If it was affordable I'd buy it.

I was interested in DNA analysis until I realized that doing so meant giving my info to law enforcement and to all the world's corporations who would use that info against my interests, and it couldn't be undone.

I would probably still be interested if there were a company that promised never to share ANYTHING with anybody and to destroy every trace of my info and sample within 90 days. But that company isn't 23andme, for sure.

I’m surprised that 23andMe have not released any new products since they started. They still offer the same SNP chip based test fundamentally. The interpretation of results has if anything become less interesting due to regulation.

It may be that there aren’t any new products that are either useful or that people want. But still, it highlights the type of company they want to be, a kind of genomics facebook.

Are there any similar tests but focused on privacy ? No online database entry, just your plain raw data. Use your own software or local statical models to look for pre-conditions, etc. No looking for family members, unless I want to upload my data to some website, and then be able to have it removed at any time.

It kills me to think that they don't realize that their business is a fad and like all fads they fizzle out. couple with the fact that i'm almost certain they will share their information with anyone who is willing to pay them for it and you've got yourself a sinking ship.

Lots of layoffs happening recently: 23andme, stubhub, tripadvisor etc. Early indicators of a tech bubble?

No, just crap companies that you don't really need. Companies that have products with actual users rather than novelty items or pure convenience will be around for a long long time because they are profitable.

While it's more pronounced in tech, it's not just tech. Lots of old economy companies tightening their belts as well based on anecdotal stories I've been hearing in the last year.

Since it's happening without the greater economy collapsing, it's actually bullish. The market cleans house sometimes and comes out stronger.

Consumers have less purchasing power each year that goes by. I wouldn't bet my career on consumer tech in the long run.

Saw an analysis of game sales on Steam for 2019 recently. Way, way down compared to 2018. Yeah, sure, it could be everybody is busy working, but it didn't look good.

This DNA testing stuff intrigues me but there’s too much shady stuff going on with the data afterwards for me to want to give it a go. A lot of this “consumer grade” DNA testing may go down in history as a great product foiled by doing shortsighted dumb stuff with people’s data.

The ultimate solution to privacy concerns is home sequencing machines. When we can sequence our own DNA, we can upload it anonymously and get many of the benefits. The one thing that wouldn't work is finding lost relatives by name. Maybe general location, though.

Stop monetizing me without compensating me.

Stop [ab]using me without my concent.

Be forthcoming and willing to establish win-win relationship with me instead of sneaking out my stuff and monetizing my stuff without disclosing what are you doing with my stuff and without compensating me.

In this case you paid (199$!) for the privilege of having your data monetized.

> DNA test sales decline

Well, there are only so many people interested in the product (ie. not creeped by it), and they're only going to use it once... 2010s will be remember as the "wonky startup" decade, between this, theranos, uber &co.

The genetic predisposition stuff has been underwhelming. I'm going to just make up an example, so keep in mind that I openly told you this is made up. Basically they put things in alarming terms. For example, after clicking through some confirmations that you are OK with learning the information, you might encounter things like: "You have an elevated predisposition to Snooferitis, with a 50% higher risk than average." And 50% sounds really scary, the way they put it. Then when you drill into it you see that the general population has a 0.2% risk of developing Snooferitis, and your risk is 0.3%, so that is, wow, elevated.

ymmv. There are definitely cases where things are more cut and dry (and possibly very not good) and sometimes the click-through confirmations about wanting to learn the information are seriously justified. But a lot of the elevated risk information just feels like fluff.

Did anyone learn anything meaningful from these tests?

I saw some results, for example, "I'm 3% Syrian, 10% Portugal, 8% Korean ...." etc., but do they provide more important results like "Sorry, you will have cancer in 2 years"?

yes + you can actually download the raw data and analyze it with a couple of other online tools (e.g. https://www.promethease.com). It may be worth it especially if you have a rare disease - but you'll have to be the judge of that

So even more people get your data, horay

If one of my siblings does a dna ancentrial test why would I need to do it???

How DNA Transfer Framed Lukis Anderson for Murder https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16903330

This is a functionality that no one asked for. Why does one need them? Let me ask an extreme question, how different is this from me naming a star after someone for their birthday? I go to some site and print out a certificate that that particular star in a given galaxy is now named Michael. Point is its a novelty thing. If a doctor asks me to get it done for a medical reason, sure. Other wise this is just a curiosity with no use.

Also, one way to look at it is we are paying to make our DNAs sellable to third parties. These have value for a long long time and the company is going to make money on that for ever. Sure there will "anonymization" of the DNA or some other privacy blurb used but we all know it will be sold.

> this is just a curiosity with no use

Small sample size, but I was adopted and didn't know my genetic background or have any family medical history. When I've been ill I hadn't been able to provide that medical information when the doctors requested it.

Thanks to 23andMe I not only know a lot more about myself, but I also found my biological parents who are married to each other and wonderful, and who have two twin sons. So suddenly I have a second set of parents, two full brothers, and three more nieces and nephews and they're all incredibly welcoming, great people who I visit often.

So I'm very happy that 23andMe exists.

23andMe is very open about selling people's data! More people are OK with this than you would think. And without those data sales to third parties, 23andMe would look very different. I hear (rumors only) that their customer acquisition cost is a large percentage of the kit cost, and what's left over could in no way cover running the SNP chip.

The 23andMe SNP chip is not very medically useful, and I can't imagine a doctor recommending anyone use 23andMe unless it's to find relatives to relieve stress about the matter. Doctors will order specialized tests from clinically vetted firms that have medical directors signing reports that put their medical licenses on the line.

All that said, giving people access to their own data is somewhat valuable; and when the company was started no one knew how valuable it would be. Turns out it's mostly only useful for genealogy, at the moment, and unlikely to be useful for much more to individuals.

What people really want to know can not be answered by these tests, for example, what foods a person should eat, how long they will live, what they need to do in order to finally find bliss, etc... There are a several tiny, shady, providers of this information that is in high demand by some consumers, but short supply from the science.

Knowing your genetic risks would be useful, it's just a shame their share the data with 3rd parties.

Hang on, haven’t they just signed a deal with a drug company worth $$$? You’d think there would be hundreds of ways to monetise the types of people who have signed up for their platform...

There are. The people laid off didn't significantly contribute to that work, however.

Competition + Novelty Factor Decline + Privacy Concerns + Not that much benefit + DNA doesn't change so no need to test more than once: Hard upper limit in sales.

Wasn't the cost of sequencing supposed to be decreasing exponentially, so we'd be able to purchase a home sequencer by now, that doesn't sell your dna.

Probably the people who wanted to have it done have done it. Others who are skeptical or uninterested were never going to do it.

Probably because repeat sales in this market are non-existent? At some point you hit a plateau in demand.

I said this here before but 23AndMe is linked to Google in multiple ways. (Search the CEO name)

You should be out of your mind to PAY to give them your most precious private data!

I'm very happy to see their sale decline even though I'm quite sure that the average consumer still doesn't care about privacy.

Alternative DNA testing products are also superior (do more tests for less $)

why would anyone sign up for a service that will link anyone in their family to law enforcement DNA tracking databases?

I’m a customer already but now that I know how non-private the identity data is, I would not do so again.

Next step: sell all the DNA results to the highest bidder.

Privacy is the reason I've never sent them my spit.

This isn't their first round of large layoffs.

Noticing a lot of layoffs recently.

Just the beginning.

That’s what happens when bad press about your company comes out, and you’re too clueless to recognize it.

Why do I really care about other people with similar genetics to me?

This seems to be a greater risk for me, if I put myself into that database.

And if someone else has a similar genetic as mine, and they commit a crime, then I’m automatically roped in as well. Do I really want the police knocking down my door, and slamming me to the ground, while they barge into my house with assault rifles and ballistic protection gear, and pointing their guns at every member of my family. This is a case of mistaken identity. But their m.o. is to shoot first, and ask questions later. No thanks!

This is the Law of Unintended Consequences at play here.

And for all the talk about cross linking your genome with others to find markers to get clues on how to cure diseases, well, I never really bought into that.

It may help, but I really don’t care. The disease problem will need to be solved in another way, that doesn’t involve the compromise of my security, however remote it may be.

I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy.

I know at least two DNA companies that send your data to China for processing and yet nobody cares.

So it may not be the reason of 23andme's problems - it might be just that the market is saturated. People who wanted to take the test, like me, already did it.

And if someone kills every memeber of your family, and they leave DNA behind, but police are not allowed to use DNA databases which WOULD find the person that commited the crime and they don't have a match otherwise (since we're already making assumptions that something will definitely happen)?

I mean this goes both ways. One thing I don't understand about this whole hate for DNA databases and matching relative's DNA on HN is... why?

Why does something that can help police catch criminals is such a bad thing? Because there are false positives? But those exist in pretty much all other investigation techniques. Cell phone positions, being seen on a surveillance camera few blocks away, having a similar car and being in the area, etc. Why is DNA so much worse?

In fact wouldn't adding more variables, such as DNA, to the existing techniques reduce the number of false positives as in "Oh yeah it's the same car, but there's 0% DNA similarity so no need to investigate further"?

Police "barging into your house with assault rifles and ballistic protection gear, and pointing guns at all members of your family" seems extremely overkill for a, let's say, 10% DNA match. And if they do really do that, then it's a problem with a police that needs to be addressed - not the DNA databases.

23andme testing is one and done. Once you've had it you will never spend a dime with them. It's a red flag for any investor.

It's worse than that, I talked my parents into doing one of these tests, now I don't ever have to pay for one.

also, the value you get out of it seemed to be mostly curiosity and novelty. Getting a bunch of stats on your heritage is nice and all but it's not any sort of ground-breaking consumer service.

They could charge you a monthly fee to keep you up to date on discoveries in this field relating to your personal DNA? (not sure how often this actually happens....)

their data could be very valuable depending on the evolution of personal medicine.

I've not seen them offering their product in big markets like China or India. How can they give up before even trying?

I can't believe they've received three quarters of a billion dollars of investment.

The largest chunk, $300 million, was a buy-in from GlaxoSmithKline, with which it purchased access to the database and research.

Given the slowing pace of drug development, that was probably a very good "investment" by GSK. But maybe it was a bad one for 23andMe if it limits the scope of deals they can do with other pharmaceutical companies.

Its not surprising when you realize how bad wealth inequality has made investors searching desperately for any place to put money.

"Anne Wojcicki married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in May 2007."

There ya go.

23andMe was a vanity project for Sergey's wife (now ex-wife.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Wojcicki

Same story for Marissa Mayer.

Interviewed here a year or so ago.

Honestly I'll admit I didn't do well technically, but every interviewer I had just seemed super impersonal and not very friendly. They asked very interrogative questions, and while I get it and am mostly ok with it, I felt like they were asking due to the existing environment they have there.

I just didn't get a great vibe.

Disclaimer: But again, I know I didn't do well on the technical stuff so maybe I'm biased negatively toward the experience.

This breaks my heart to hear. I interviewed there in 2011 as an infra guy, and not only was the infra team personable (the winning question was rapidly identifying the symptoms of a duplex mismatch on a switch ethernet port), the VP of Engineering was awesome as well. He even went so far as to say, "As a tech person, you belong out here in the Bay, even if it's not with us". I turned down the offer, but it was one of the best interview experiences I've ever had.

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