Blackstone to Acquire Ancestry.com for $4.7B | Hacker News Reader

Blackstone to Acquire Ancestry.com for $4.7B

reuters.com

200 pointspeterlk151 comments

As someone who is interested in genealogy it's a bit frustrating to have so many different services competing to hoover up various data sets and hold them in their private fiefdoms, each of which requires a fee.

FamilySearch is the one major exception, mostly I believe because of their deep religious obligations. The Mormons microfilmed a staggering collection of data over the decades and it has all been getting digitized. The problem is, some of their digitized collections are now no longer available because the custodians of the original records seem to have signed deals with some of the private genealogy services.

Ancestry and companies like them, do provide the service of indexing many of these records which is no small task, but most of these documents are public records, and I don't understand why they shouldn't be available to anyone. I know for example FamilySearch has digitized images of all the Scottish censuses back to the 1841 but you can't look at the original records any longer. There are many other examples like this... original WWII draft cards for the US used to be available there, now you have to go to Ancestry and pay a fee.

Surely there must be a solution to this problem which involves neither privatization of massive amounts of personal data nor vicarious baptism.

The vicarious baptism is going to happen regardless.

You will 1) be dead, so probably not care, and 2) in the unlikely event that you do still care, they believe that you have the opportunity to opt out.

Yup. I very much want the Mormons to posthumously baptize me!

I mean, it will probably do absolutely nothing. But, if it does have an effect, I will be eternally (literally) grateful for their help in the afterlife.

I got your back. I'll be on the lookout for function_seven and take care of it for you!

> I mean, it will probably do absolutely nothing. But, if it does have an effect, I will be eternally (literally) grateful for their help in the afterlife.

This is Pascal's Fallacious Wager, the idea that (as you've instantiated it here) Mormonism is the only religion that might potentially be correct. Either the Mormons are right, or everyone is wrong.

But if you believe the Mormons might be right, you have no way to exclude the possibility that the Mormons are wrong, but somebody else is right. In which case the baptism might cause you eternal harm.

This is close, but not really Pascal's Wager. For one, I do not currently practice any religion. But if I did, I'd have to pick one exclusively, to the detriment of the others. So of course his wager is a weak argument.

But with posthumous baptism, it is someone else doing the thing. And multiple different religions can all claim me as their own. There can be overlap, maybe. (Or maybe not, who knows? We're in angels on the head of a pin territory here)

So, if the Mormons baptizing me causes me eternal harm, then both of the following would be true:

1. They do have supernatural powers after all. (i.e. Mormon rituals have an effect on souls, deities, etc.)

2. But their belief system is wrong.

I guess one can construct a system where both #1 and #2 hold, but I don't see it as being nearly as likely as either one in isolation.

You forgot #3: if posthumous baptism actually caused harm, it would mean that whichever belief system is "right" punishes people for choices outside their own control (i.e., the actions of others).

Even if that's in the realm of possibility, it sounds pretty unreasonable in the context of deciding one's eternal fate.

Wouldn't it be as unlikely that a deity would reward you for the deeds of others?

Oh this is a rabbit hole I don't think we want to climb down.

I know I invited 'unlikely' in but let's not make it too welcome or we'll be here all week, or until dang tells us to knock it off.

Mormonism's belief is not that you will be rewarded because some one posthumously baptized you, but because you accepted that baptism in the after-life. All are rewarded according to their own decisions/desires.

Edit:

Well actually, Mormonism is a Christian faith that teaches that salvation comes in and through Jesus Christ, so it really isn't your actions or their actions- but the actions of Jesus Christ- taken on your behalf, that leads to salvation- if you accept it. But it isn't so much a reward as it is an act of mercy.

That is still rewarding you for the combined effort why wouldn't an infinitely powerful being redeem you himself?

Right, I am sorry, as soon as I hit reply I realized the mistake I made and edited my comment. I was so focused on the baptism thing I wasn't seeing the whole picture :)

I am pleased that it is possible to have so reasonable and pleasant a discussion here even on contentious topic.

Me too :) Theology can be a very fascinating topic when it is discussed in a reasonable and pleasant manner!

Um, I mean, the contention of Mormonism (and Christianity in general) is that He did.

That same being endorsed baptism by undergoing it himself.

This may seem contradictory, but becomes much more tractable if you're open to the idea that "redemption" is just an abstraction, with multiple inputs, some provideable by Providence, some provideable by others, and some provideable only by the subject in question.

The idea that the actions of a stranger can have permanent harmful effects on you is both (1) historically common as applied to supernatural effects, and (2) completely normal in ordinary life.

The very common beliefs that your soul might be damaged by someone mutilating your corpse, or stepping on your grave, aren't noticeably different from the belief that your soul might be damaged by someone anointing your corpse or a representative of your corpse.

The commonality of these beliefs doesn't affect how likely I think they are to be true.

The Principle of the Excluded Middle is something software developers marinate ourselves in. I was going to say, "are familiar with" but we just do it, we don't see it.

"What pendulum swing can we ride on going 'WHEEEEEEE' today?"

He says sarcastically, uncomfortably eyeballing the JAMStack bookmarks he has queued up to read...

What does the principle of the excluded middle have to do with this?

This idea has me curious. What religions believe that the independent actions of others can cause you eternal harm? If I unilaterally declare every person who has ever lived to be adopted into my religion (founded 30 seconds ago), does the religion that a person conscientiously chose for themselves now declare them to be harmed by my action? If so, does a second individual or institution claiming them posthumously add to the harm?

I would be very interested to be educated on such beliefs.

Well - not me personally. I'm already in the system. (The one way to be sure Mormons won't have you baptized after your death: join up beforehand!) I didn't mean to imply that proxy baptism is a bad thing. I just meant it's going to happen regardless of any other data-extraction schemes any other organizations come up with.

I think this is an application where Google could help. Google Ancestry. Archive digitalization like Google Books plus genealogy tree generation (it could build diverging trees and people could help to fix them like in Google Maps)

Ex-mormon and ex-partner of a (secular) genealogist reporting in.

Every bit of non-archival information the Mormons have should be annotated with [citation needed]. There is an appalling amount of wishful thinking and supposition in their genealogy data. You are in effect looking at research on a par with a high school research paper. It's all sourced from people who have been doing this for a short time and are seeking out indications that they are done, not that they are correct.

Though I do agree that anyone who is willing to build a bomb-proof archival facility is worthy of a degree of respect.

(Those salt dome film archives we have in the great plains are amazing too)

What non-archival information are you talking about? Everything I see on familysearch is primary documents or text indexed directly. Anything else are simply trees that others have created. And I definitely wouldn't trust that info blindly because users do really get overzealous in trying to trace their lineage. But family search allows you to attach primary documents to all names so you can easily confirm whether that info is valid or not.

Yes, I agree here. The beauty of FamilySearch is that they've done an amazing job archiving and cataloging the primary documents they have. Ancestry does have some good stuff too, but FamilySearch can feel more like an online research library.

I know they do auto-generate some tree information which can be incorrect, but that can largely be ignored or used as hints, etc.

I get the sense that not many people realize just exactly how much stuff they have actually accumulated. It's truly amazing for the areas that I've been looking at which are primarily US, Canada, Britain and Ireland.

I tend to think of it as one of the pillars of online data collections along with things like, archive.org and, say, Google Books. It's incredible the amount of material that is at our fingertips now.

The one biggest missing pieces for me is the staggering number of microfilmed historical newspapers that have yet to be digitized. I know the library of Congress has put a lot on line but there are still 10s of thousands of rolls of microfilm that haven't been processed and I'm not sure if there is any push to do it.

> The one biggest missing pieces for me is the staggering number of microfilmed historical newspapers that have yet to be digitized.

Blackstone just bought the best resource for this, newspapers.com

Costs between $8 and $20/month.

Genealogist was constantly getting upset because someone would see a John Johnson in the same town in roughly the same age bracket and say that's him, make the link and move on without a second thought.

Problem is, our fascination with unique names is very recent. Our forebears were highly unoriginal with names, language barriers (including illiteracy + accents) would sometimes unintentionally see a person get a slightly different name in a new town. She had a guy with three names, and a suspicion that when he disappeared that he didn't die in a ditch, but instead finally changed his name on purpose.

Looking through my mother's research, I found what I thought were first cousins marrying, so I backed away slowly. Genealogist saw this a lot. Just mark it done and don't think about it any more.

After some more time with genealogist I finally looked at it more closely. This guy found himself a wife who was six days younger than his paternal cousin of the same name, from an unrelated family. Apparently nobody in this fucked up little town could figure out how to name their kids. Everyone named a kid after grandma, or married someone with grandma's name, and half of them had a sister named after her. Nine. There were nine women, by birth or marriage, in 3 generations, with the same first name, in the same town. I can't imagine family gatherings.

Ever wonder how you get 'Peggy' from Margaret? I don't anymore. Somewhere there was Grandma Margaret who just wanted to nap in peace and so she nicknamed her granddaughter Peggy so people would stop yelling her name.

>I found what I thought were first cousins marrying, so I backed away slowly.

This was and, to an extent, still is quite normal, so I'm not sure why people have such an issue with it. Genetic issues build up if you keep doing it for generations, but unless the first cousins were raised together there is none of the power imbalances at play. Those who were raised together have an effect kick in so that they see each other as siblings and don't marry.

Even though in your case it didn't happen, it isn't something worth worrying even had it occurred.

If both parents have a recessive gene for a recessive genetic disorder, their offspring will inherit that disorder. That's why people have such an issue with it. It doesn't take multiple generations for this to happen. But I agree that it'll get much worse if it keeps happening, as heterozygous couples will eventually produce these recessive offsprings, who, when mated, will produce children with these disorders.

> If both parents have a recessive gene for a recessive genetic disorder, their offspring will inherit that disorder. That's why people have such an issue with it. It doesn't take multiple generations for this to happen.

But that's only relevant to the immediate offspring. A single generation of outbreeding reduces the level of inbreeding to zero. So if you see a cousin marriage several generations back... so what?

>That's why people have such an issue with it.

I see that as a common claim, but given the lack of similar concern to non related individuals with recessive genetic disorders, even in cases where both parents have it, or in cases where parents have dominant genetic disorders, I find myself seeing this as a more after the fact rationalization than the actual reasoning. And as for the actual increase it risk, it seems quite minor compared to many other behaviors that increase risk which society doesn't frown upon nearly as much (with drinking and drug use being the notable exceptions that are routinely condemned).

> If both parents have a recessive gene for a recessive genetic disorder, their offspring will inherit that disorder.

Nope, if both parents have the gene and neither has the disorder (e.g., both are heterozygous), offspring will get the disorder 1/4 of the time, be a carrier half of the time, and be clear 1/4 of the time.

If both have the disorder, the child will also have the disorder, but that's usually not the concern.

Ah, sorry. I should have said if both parents are homozygous recessive. Good catch.

> If both parents have a recessive gene for a recessive genetic disorder, their offspring will inherit that disorder. That's why people have such an issue with it.

This is simply not accurate. Or rather, it's partially accurate, and it's only part of the story. The increase in risk isn't huge, and the amount it happens effectively leads little to be concerned about.

"Contrary to widely held beliefs and longstanding taboos in America, first cousins can have children together without a great risk of birth defects or genetic disease, scientists are reporting today. They say there is no biological reason to discourage cousins from marrying."

"'In some parts of the world,' the report says, '20 to 60 percent of all marriages are between close biological relatives.'"

"Dr. Motulsky said researchers did not know why marriage between cousins was viewed with such distaste in the United States. He said some of the revulsion might have stemmed from the eugenics movement, which intended to improve the human race by deciding who should be allowed to breed. The movement flourished in this country early in the 20th century." [1]

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/04/us/few-risks-seen-to-the-...

"In some parts of the world,' the report says, '20 to 60 percent of all marriages are between close biological relatives."

Probably isolated areas, like small islands or remote settlements in the wilderness where there is not much to choose from.

I've lived a year in such a place and, while there weren't genetic illnesses that I was aware of, I wouldn't use that place as evidence of how inbreeding is innocuous. Let's leave it at that.

> I've lived a year in such a place and, while there weren't genetic illnesses that I was aware of, I wouldn't use that place as evidence of how inbreeding is innocuous. Let's leave it at that.

So you... didn't see any genetic issues, thought that they were sub-par humans, and are blaming inbreeding? That's not a great look on your part.

I suggest we stick to studies and data, and leave it there instead.

Curiousity is killing me, what is this cursed place? I want to form my own opinion.

I brought that up less as an 'eww inmarriage' and more of a "these are not the same people if you are paying attention".

We don't have the people around anymore to corroborate. Just the records. And those are tiny little vistas into the lives of billions of people.

> Ever wonder how you get 'Peggy' from Margaret?

The nickname "Peg" was chosen as a rhyme to the more obvious (also extant) nickname "Meg".

When Ancestry.com was youngish, the genealogy community started pushing back against the quality control problems. It's entirely likely that in the intervening time they mostly succeeded in improving the quality of the data. But she spent a lot of energy on refuting evidence that turned out to be circumstantial.

Collection of some of the posters you were talking about: https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/en/collections-archives/d...

Yeah, I went on there a year or two ago, looking for census records for my house and found that they'd listed my grandmother as deceased. The person who made the record found birth/marriage records and presumed she was dead because of her age.

...Is this famed ‘eventual consistency’?

I used research records from the LDS, twenty years ago. I ordered film from Salt Lake City once, too, and waited a month for it. I also used other sources that are not LDS, but long ago. I used Ancestry email listserv at that time.

I believe the parent comment misrepresents what I saw, at that time. Some sources that were "family Bible" sort of records, were marked as such. Authoritative sources, like the microfilm of late 1800's US Census, were also marked for what they were. US Daughters of the American Revolution a bit, too.

The late 90s saw a coalescing of previously disparate sources, and even "high quality" records turned out to have important errors, in some cases. The lower quality was DAR, which was (for me) shown to be inconsistant. I have not looked at these sources in any recent era, so things may have changed with monetization.

Ancestry.com was founded by BYU grad students and is based in Provo. It couldn’t be more “Mormon”.

I’m pretty sure my Dad has worked at the records facility where they are scanning that microfilm for almost 30 years now. He’s not an engineer but he actually helped with their assembly line and designed modifications to the fancy scanners they use. He’s always bragging about the huge amount of bandwidth they have. But last time I heard him talk about it they are still decades away from having all the information scanned and uploaded.

I’m a former investor in the company. Many comments here focus on the DNA business, but the company treats it as more as lead gen, a “cheap” way to get new customers in and later to subscribe to their family tree product that prints cash. The DNA business is breakeven but that’s a lot cheaper than funding TV shows like Who Do You Think You Are - which was their old marketing tool.

Funny anecdotes: - they own findagrave.com which is exactly what it sounds like - they paid $50mm at one point to the Mormon church to effectively shut down their only competitor (family search.org). They also offered ancestry.com membership for free to every Mormon as well. The agreement handed over Mormon church’s records making Ancestry’s database broader. - they sometimes call themselves a “Social Network for dead people” because you can opt to make your family tree public, allowing you to see connections/overlaps between your ancestors and others.

As far as I am aware, familysearch.org is still quite operational?

They are definitely still operational but they no longer compete with Ancestry for content like they used to. In fact they rely on Ancestry to digitize their own archives

This deserves some clarification. FamilySearch has a massive crowd-sourcing organization for volunteer indexing. Anybody can participate in their free time.

FamilySearch is alive and well. What are you talking about there?

Here is the [link to the investment](https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/central/provo/ancestr...). The way they justified it to investors is that this removed the threat of FS ever competing with then in their core business. Back when Ancestry was public, they listed FS as their [#1 competitor](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1469433/000095012309...). Here is a [story](http://www.ancestryinsider.org/2012/07/ancestrycom-laps-fami...) from 2012 showing how the two companies were measured against each other for key content digitizations

This has huge, far reaching privacy concerns.

How many folks here would like to give their DNA information to private equity?

I don't see it making a difference. If someone is willing to give away their DNA in the first place i doubt they care who to.

Outside of this community how many people submitting their DNA to Ancestry looked up their privacy, data selling policies and shareholders? I don't imagine many.

You give away your dna when talking/breathing. If someone collected that or an old coffee cup.. now what?

There's a vast difference between a centralized, tagged database of DNA and the unanalyzed random DNA left by chance on coffee cups.

Hopefully your family members haven't already done so for you.

Exactly this! This is not just a personal privacy decision (i.e. I give or not my DNA). If any of my family gave their DNA, I am now traceable. This is exponentially bad, and not regulated accordingly. The Blackstone Group is the private equity owning Motel 6... the very same Motel 6 that voluntary helped ICE by giving guest lists ?!? So what is next ? They also owned several companies in healthcare, including a company doing respiratory equipments and another one providing medical services. DNA collection should be regulated way more strictly.

Not trying to defend blackstone but they have half a trillion in AUM. I highly doubt they were directly involved in such decision.

I don't understand what their AUM has to do with it?

I believe GP was trying to say that management of the owning company doesn't necessarily spend a great deal of time going through all the ongoing details of every business owned, compared to a company that might only have Ancestry.com as an asset.

I don't think this really alleviates concerns people have though.

You can be traced in many, many ways. From all the websites you visit, the accounts you have, social media posts and pictures, connections with others, camera's outside, your car, your job, whatever more. There's very little true privacy in modern urban life.

Yet, while privacy issues are a point of concern among geneticists when it comes to direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the general points of caution are directed to relational and emotional issues. Many people think little of the relational consequences genetic testing can bear, where family members are implicated often unwillingly. Another point is that people often make up wrong conclusions about their results and see them as some infallible passport of who they are, while the tests are limited in what they actually can tell. Or let's say tests show you have a disposition for increased disease risk. I doubt many give it a really good thought of whether they truly want to know and live with said knowledge for the rest of their lives.

"Blackstone is buying Ancestry.com from private equity firms Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity and Permira."

That cat was already out of the bag.

This - everyone freaking out over this is right, but ummmm, years too late.

Did it many years ago. Would do it again.

you have no idea how deep this goes. nations are selling data at population scale

I'm not sure DNA is something that is even possible to protect. You leave samples of it everywhere you go, and you share most of it with everyone else anyway.

I happen to think my DNA is pretty good, but it's not like I had anything to do with that. It's more like I happen to like the seed for the minecraft world I'm playing.

I don't feel like I own my DNA in the same way that I own property or things. It helped me be who I am, but why would I stop someone else from looking at it or trying to use it in some way? As long as I get to keep using it, I'm happy.

People who hand over their DNA won’t care in the slightest. For the rest of us this confirms our understanding.

What understanding is that?

That it's foolish to have your genome in a database because there is no guarantee with regard to how that data may be used or misused in the future, or even who will own it.

That's like saying it's foolish to have your photos in a database..

Or Name... because someone might misuse it.

That very well might be the case.

How does this affect ancestry.ca, the Canadian wing? Is it operated separately? I suspect other laws might come into play for Canadian use data?

Correct. See, for example, this story about a man being arrested and jailed for a crime he didn’t commit because his photo was in a database:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...

The implications for misuse of genetic information are even more serious.

> The implications for misuse of genetic information are even more serious.

Such as?

Utilizing biomarkers that are indicative of disease progression for discriminating against massive numbers of people -- for things like employment, healthcare and the like.

The thing people don't realize is that laws are highly ineffective against this sort of thing... as machines and algorithms are fed data and made to output numbers ... even the implementers don't totally understand what exactly is leading to discrimination.

That is already illegal

China and India are seeking capture a good fraction of their population. The US military types every soldier, but claims to remove data when you separate.

In contrast the US and Europe have purchased testing by volunteers at levels that beat the military and approach involuntary state programs.

Calling it foolish implies choice. Your genome may be in the database if you have family that participates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/business/dna-database-sea...

That the primary consequential use of these databases will be for law enforcement, not to tell you about your families history.

How can you make sure that nobody in your family give their DNA, though ? Because by doing so, they partially reveal your DNA, and this can be used against you, especially if like The Blackstone Group, they also own healthcare companies.

You can't. It's like the folks who say "just don't use Facebook." Well, that doesn't prevent other people from tagging me in photos.

Some matches can made at one person, or fourth cousin. You could have a lot of them.

Anyone who was born in California after 1983, has had their DNA collected by the state.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/05/08/california-biob...

Apparently you can request for your child's data to be destroyed, but you won't get any kind of confirmation.

Is this something the ACLU is aware of?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/14...

This was four years ago, I wonder what the status is today.

Key sentences from the article:

There would be serious punishments for those who resist: Refusing the compulsory testing could mean a year in jail or a $33,000 fine

Kuwait's government says the database could be used to fight terrorism and crime

Ahh yes - the old, oft used and worn out terrorism excuse ...

I mean, DNA traces are being left everywhere humans go. It will eventually be trivial to sample and sequence DNA. At that point, anyone could pick up your DNA traces in public and sequence them. I think we'll need to come to terms with the fact that DNA privacy will be non-existent in only a few decades.

I was just discussing this on here a couple weeks back [1]. Giving your DNA to a corporation is only a concern in the short to medium term. In the long term there will be nothing you can do to stop a malicious organization from taking your DNA. I asked what exactly were the negative repercussions that one can expect in that time frame from losing privacy regarding one's DNA and I'm not particularly worried about any of the answers. This news wouldn't yet change that even if ancestry.com had my DNA data.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23923087

Beware changes to TOS. That seems a particularly dangerous dataset.

When you buy a rental property you have to abide by current leases until they expire. There out to be something roughly similar for PII, acquisition, including actively enduring that everyone can have their days expunged.

I changed my mind about DNA acquisition / privacy concerns after reading the backstory of the Golden State Killer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo

Officers uploaded DNA from a rape kit and got back a family tree, then investigated all 2,000 possibilities. Problem solved.

He’d eluded capture till the ripe old age of 77 or so, after having raped around 50 women and murdering several by beating them to death with logs.

Can someone help me understand some concrete scenarios where DNA testing is clearly a bad thing? Because it seems to be a net win for society. Leave your DNA at a crime scene -> you’ve left your ID.

It really looks like something useful, until it will be misused. It is not a matter of if, but of when. So, better to not have this at all, even if the price to pay is if some cases will go unsolved.

You must think about the worse case and consider the consequences. Think about a reelect Trump feeling empowered using such a thing, don't know, to target minorities with his white supremacist ideals. If this is too much for you, consider China with Uighurs instead.

Make this 100x worse considering this is a private enterprise.

The authoritarian Left is just as much a concern as Trump. Consider China with the... Wait, you already said China.

Because a crime scene might also have the DNA of innocent people.

Because public DNA information could be a source of prejudice mis-used by government, law enforcement, health services, employers, even family, friends, and potential spouses.

Because in all likelihood it would become another way to generate targeted advertising.

DNA is often not enough though. We also need a camera at home (maybe not in the bathroom though) and a body camera that can record us and others, to help police solve crimes. no?

Since we're actively in the midst of a national reckoning with police overreach (at a minimum), while people are getting arrested for constitutionally protected speech largely based on their political alignment, I think the slippery slope argument is honestly quite valid here. It's scary to me that a relative's choice to dig into their family tree will law enforcement to significantly narrow the search space for someone they don't like and happen to have a strand of hair from.

Leave someone else's dna at a crime you've framed someone, how did you get that dna, well you bought it from some unscrupulous lab. Or how about insurance companies start purchasing this data, oh but thats illegal so lets just say we don't but actually really do and totally pervert the idea of insurance. Golden state killer might stick out in your mind as a horrible evil but its nothing against the trillions of cuts by making this data widely available for purchase.

I don't mean to be dismissive, but engineers tend to simplify these problems, as if the legal system is a perfect justice-dispensing black box. But that's not how it works. This is a question of ethics and moral weights. This is why we have things like habeas corpus, chain of custody, rules about juries and evidence, and all kinds of things.

DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns. The chance that some criminals might elude capture is one of the implications of why, for example, we don't implant everyone with a tracking chip, or require people to report their whereabouts to the government. If everyone had a tracking chip, no one could commit crimes any more, right?

This is a reductio argument, but it shows why what might seem like "sure-shot" strategies (versions of which, in some cases, have been implemented in authoritarian governments) were definitely not "net wins" for society.

I urge you to spend time reading the Wikipedia page of the golden state killer. Put yourself in the victims’ shoes. Imagine someone waking you in the middle of the night with a floodlight, shoving a gun in your face, screaming at you to lay on the floor while they put dishes on your back, saying “If I hear these fall, I’ll kill everyone.” Then he takes your loved one to the livingroom and mercilessly rapes her for hours.

The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA.

How, then, is it ethical to look someone in the eye and say “Your lover was murdered, and we could find who did it, but we won’t”?

> The ethical argument cuts both ways. Not only did that scenario happen, but it happened fifty times. He was unstoppable by anything but DNA.

The atrocities committed by authoritarian governments by far exceed the emotional force of your argument. From the Holocaust, to the Great Leap Forward, to the Holodomor. We're talking so much suffering that you can't even comprehend it (think of it like a moral neutron star). Millions murdered, raped, and tortured over the course of decades. Given what history has taught us so far, the ethical downsides of authoritarian carte blanche by far exceeds the downsides of erring on the side of protecting individual rights.

DNA testing revealed that I am 47% Jewish, so yes, the holocaust argument is particularly relevant. I have weighed these concerns. But you’re vaguely gesturing towards atrocities and saying “There are good reasons, right there!” And I just don’t see them.

Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people? Because certain unnamed countries seem to already be doing that, and they are either already using DNA or don’t need it.

The argument here seems to be “if we let the US do this, there is a very real risk of authoritarian overreach.” Sure, I see that. I just don’t buy it. What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing?

Even if the world mandated DNA testing tomorrow for the entire population, we would largely be in the same position we’re already in, thanks to the internet and smartphones.

I realize this is an unpopular stance. But is it mistaken?

> What specifically is the concern with, say, the US or Britain using DNA testing?

Nobody can say, because the conditions that would lead to abuse would manifest themselves in the future. The only thing we do know for sure is that there is no form of government that is immune to potential abuses of power. They have all had abuses in the past, and we can be confident that abuses of power will happen again.

My issue is largely the assumption that presence of DNA == person who committed the crime.

We leave DNA all over the place. If I drop some hair at the scene of a crime 12 hours before it was committed, I could become the innocent sole suspect of something heinous.

> Will you please walk me through a scenario that starts with DNA testing and ends with the murder of millions of people?

Imagine a genetic marker predisposes someone towards crime X. Now imagine that in the hands of law enforcement.

If X happens one of the first things they'll do is round up everyone with genes for X and try to place them at the scene of the crime.

The problem with that is that it means nothing. Just because a person is more likely to do X does not mean they've done X.

How do we know that will happen? Because it already happens with DNA evidence today. It weighs far more heavily in cases than it should. It may prove that you were there, but it doesn't show what you did. And that's a problem. Juries aren't generally good at realizing what DNA does and does not show.

You might think "Well, the defense should do a better job at debunking the DNA evidence". Yeah, they should. However, it's a long uphill battle to educate someone. Most people still think lie detectors and handwriting analysis actually work. Hell, many people believe that "essential oils" have mystical healing properties. You want to walk those people through the long process of "correlation is not causation"? Good luck. All the prosecutor has to do is get a DNA analysis finished which proves the presence and a cop to say "Oh, he was really evasive when I arrested him".

The state of our justice system is perfectly summed up by this tweet.

"I actually wore a bandana covering my face, nose down, to go to the bank today. Whole time I'm thinking, 'I've convicted people on less evidence than this ...'", Andy McCarthy [0]

It takes staggering little evidence to convict someone of a crime and the general public sees DNA evidence (due to shows like CSI) as absolute proof of guilt.

This may not be "murder of millions" but it certainly wouldn't be a place I'd want to live. I'd rather not be arrested by a lazy cop because I happened to go to the bank the same day it was robbed.

[0] https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/12581541951040184...

I very purposefully avoid hypotheticals which is why I didn't reply to @sillysaurusx (because you're just debating fantasy), but this is a good post and seems entirely plausible within the next century.

PS: I really wish people would stop mass downvoting @sillysaurusx. This is a pretty good discussion.

(It's okay! Karma shmarma -- I enjoyed talking with you too. Lots of people made some excellent points.)

Same here. I’m not agreeing with all @sillysaurusx is saying but I’m learning from the exchange and don’t want it discouraged.

> DNA testing revealed that I am 47% Jewish

That's not what DNA tests do. They do not tell you whether you are factually X% of A and Y% of B, as they do not have the data to make such claims and they do not have DNA of ones' ancestors except through inference.

What they do tell you is that, based on current day large-scale survey data which they use to identify markers, you share certain markers with certain contemporary groups. Especially the percentages they give you should take with a grain of salt as they are approximations to a ground truth (one which nobody fully knows).

Interesting. The context is here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1286481753675374594

I didn't realize there might be an error term. But, fwiw, my father's brother mentioned almost in passing to my wife about my Jewish ancestry. Apparently one of my parents were the first to marry outside of the faith in a very, very long time. Getting back a 47% match seems to be experimental proof of this, which I was very surprised was possible.

So perhaps the error is around ~3%? I wonder what it might be...

Let us imagine some scenarios. There are constant low level crimes that are always going on. Perhaps the best example is drug usage an ever present issue. Whereas different groups commit such "crimes" enforcement is anything but even. Also those so caught often fall prey to factors that make it harder for them to get a job or a home and thus are more likely to end up re-offending. One can imagine "proving" that certain genetics that just happen to be correlated with African heritage correlate with offending when it actually correlates with being more likely to be caught and then racism laundered by bad science and stats justifies the extra scrutiny that results in additional scrutiny that results in greater prosecution and greater persecution.

How about increasingly good tech makes smaller and smaller amounts of DNA testable providing a genetic trail that proves not your participation in the crime but merely your presence at some point where it happened or even in areas where people you may have touched carried it to. With nearly a third of murders unsolved it would be awfully convenient to pin some of those on people that just happened to pass nearby especially if the person is a minority or someone with a record. The fact that most cases in America are conducted by threatening parties with penalties many times worse than they would experience and extracting pleas makes this substantially easier especially when you wont necessarily get great representation if you are poor. Take this plea for 20 years with parole possible after 10 years or we will fight to have you yourself murdered for a murder you didn't commit!

Another example derive increasingly good data on people's likely health outcomes as health care costs skyrocket due to being designed to extract value and not to promote health. First wait until it is in danger of destroying an increasing toll of lives not saved due to lack of funds then instead of fixing ANY of the systemic flaws promote the the idea that your insurance/care is only becoming so expensive that you can hardly afford it because you are carrying people who aren't being responsible by paying for their own care extra points if you tie this to race, nationality, or best yet both.

Completely ignore the fact that with sufficient foreknowledge costs are mostly predictable and the entire purpose of a cost pool is to provide a single predictable cost financed by transferring funds from the those who are not needy to those who are while allowing the person running the pool to earn interest in the interim and stick to the narrative that the people with predictable costs this year aren't paying their share and fight for the ability to offer insurance indexed to their increasingly predictable costs.

If you do a good enough job at this you can extract increasing rents for years while killing more people than Hitler before you manage to collapse health care as you know it and eventually the surrounding society as the only people that can afford healthcare will increasingly be those who don't need it or those experiencing a truly difficult to foresee misadventure.

When the serfs realize how badly they have it you can graduate from Hitler level of excess mortality to great leap forward levels in the ensuing violence and famine.

Edit: The cheap shot is of course people can use a pre existing database to decide whom to target for murder.

We know the Nazis used German census data to identify Jews to round up. They also had many pseudo-scientific tests such as the size of a nose, to help them identify the Untermenschen in the general population. The next regime that pushes a superman theory will be able to base their selection criteria on DNA testing as soon as the perfect Nordic / Aryan genes are determined. Or pseudo determined. That's how you get from DNA testing to millions being killed or enslaved.

You are using an argument style of the sort “there is a good reason to do this, and a bad thing that will happen if we don’t do this.” It’s flaw is that it ignores the bigger picture and competing interests, where we find there are other competing good and bad things to think about.

If you imagine a world where crime is truly impossible, it is a world where humans are utterly incapable of disobeying the government under any desperate or impassioned circumstance

This perspective is understandable, but requires a lot more reading before you stick to it. There's a lot of bad bad history based on this viewpoint.

This justification could have literally come from the mouth of a Simpsons parody of a republican talk show host[1]. By that logic, what can't we justify by imagining the worst criminals in history and how they could have been stopped with a surveillance state?

[1] https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E05/743793

I’ll ignore the “won’t someone think of the children” argument, and highlight the research into how frequently DNA evidence is misused, and how poor juries are at understanding both DNA science and probability/stats.

This is a tale as old as time, seeing something that can, in morally-perfect hands, be used for good and saying "why not!?" while ignoring the human capacity (inevitability?) to use it ignorantly or outright maliciously and cause harm that outweighs the potential good.

If it makes you sleep better, these crimes happened 50 ago, it wouldn't be possible to repeat today with the prevalence of technology (phone tracing, fingerprints, cameras, fingerprints, etc...). The perpetrator would be caught fairly quickly.

The vast majority of murders that we are in fact actually pretty poor at preventing or solving are the result of people killing people they know or criminals killing one another.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

We only solve less than 2/3 of murders that are known to be murders which individually ought to be vastly easier than random murders.

It is hard to quantify how many of the missing are victims estimates range from 180 to 1800 annual deaths. This means its between half as many as drown in their bathtub and 5 times as many in the worst case.

All this out of a population of aprox 330M people 600k people who will for example die of cancer for context.

It is terrible that serial murderers exist but we cannot and should not rearrange all of our priorities and ignore the rights of the hundreds of millions in order to protect the few.

> DNA acquisition is rife with privacy concerns

Such as?

You know, collecting the DNA of everyone and being able to use it to trace them.

Trace them how?

Supposed you lived in Nazi germany during Kristallnacht and someone could just say "Hallo Siri, wo sind die Nicht-Arier?"

Chief Medical Officer of Intel talking about what hacks look like on people's genetic information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

Question: do the hacker/home-DNA labs allow for the ability to take someone's DNA, amplify or recreate it, then allow you to smear it on a jacket or a dead person's cheek, thereby framing an innocent person?

They would need to purify the DNA (remove all other amino acids and membrane proteins etc.) to amplify it and remove any traces of chemicals used for the amplification.

But A) naked DNA will be exposed to the elements/chemicals which could cause damage/denaturation, B) it would look really odd to find batches of pure DNA without any hairs/cells/other proteins.

Maybe some techniques exist to replicate more believable tissue? Honestly not sure as I'm not too well versed on lab-techniques other than sequencing.

Methylation analysis could tell them apart, since DNA from PCR isn't methylated. But most forensic labs wouldn't do this, and I think it would be very possible to frame someone in this way.

The number of killers in the world is significantly dwarfed by all of the people who aren't killers. And even then, among all of the people who have ever killed someone, the number who were not caught but would have been caught if the police only had access to everyone's DNA is so vamishingly small, that there is no reason to take this seriously.

Not to mention that your argument falls apart once you realize that we have no real idea how powerful DNA evidence is, especially when found in small quantities. Is it possible that, if I walk daily by a high-rise that I have never entered, my DNA could be found in a room inside that building (e.g. because a fallen hair or my sneezing got on the clothes/shoes of someone passing by)? Likely, yes.

In fact, I would bet that trying to match all of the DNA at all of the crime scenes with all of the people in America would be much more likely to increase the number of false convictions than to help bring more murderers to justice.

> Can someone help me understand some concrete scenarios where DNA testing is clearly a bad thing?

It may be a good thing for society, but it may be bad for me.

Suppose that in the process of investigating all 2,000 possibilities, the detective in question was lazy, and figured that you know, #56 fits the bill if we kind of squint.

#56 would then have a pretty nasty legal surprise to deal with, where they had to come up with an alibi for "Where were you on the night of November 23rd, 1986?" Best of luck defending yourself against that!

If I had more faith in our police system, this wouldn't be a concern. I don't, though. Police have a history of routinely misused partially-matching DNA/fingerprints/police line mugshots, to either convict, or cause serious problems for people who later turned out to be innocent.

So, I'll have a strong pass on having my DNA entered into a database. There is no personal upshot for me, and only downside, if some idiot with a badge, a gun, and an incredibly poor grasp of statistics stumbles upon me.

Funny I came to the exact opposite opinion from that.

Some commentary from another that actively does genealogy as a hobby:

i think it will be good cause the old guys were mis managing

In what ways?

I know several 3rd party developers that were just begging for the opportunity to talk to anybody in the organization about how they could configure there software to have the least impact possible on Ancestry, and they wouldn't reply. And then one day they sent a Cease and Desist order, which alienated thousands of customers who relied on those 3rd party apps. Stuff like that. Nobody listens there.

ah the totally "This is our IP, you can't use it" vs "This is a sales opportunity" mindset.

it's worse than that, they just didn't care.. and then they tried to sell themselves and wanted to minimize costs, and blamed 3rd party guys for how backed up their servers were and bad mouthed them. Tried to make themselves look more profitable than they are bad culture thing. almost a monopoly and it's a reputable private equity place - not some vulture company somebody that will come in and challenge their business model but not tell them how to run their business

This is huge! Congratulations to a Ancestry! This is one of a few billion-dollar-plus exits of a startup company in Utah over the past 2 years, with others such as Qualtrics and PluralSight also coming to mind. We're starting to see more unicorns come out of Utah. As someone who lives in Utah, that's great!

Don’t forget Instructure: acquired this year for $2B by Thoma Bravo.

How is ancestry.com a startup at this point? It was founded in 1996.

I wouldn't really call this an "exit". They already IPOd back in 2012, and then went private after that.

Why is genealogical data so valuable?

There's an incredible amount of uses for high quality genealogical data:

-Actuaries/insurance companies: Longevity is largely heritable

-Drug Development/Pharma: The newest drugs are all gene therapies and data sets provide amble grounds for deep neural networks. Identifying potential causes of curable conditions, or identify a marketable consumer base.

-Police/Surveillance: I believe a genealogy database is actually how the Golden State killer was caught.

Certainly there are other use cases, but these are the most obvious to me.

Marketing based on genetic predispositions...

Is the first legal?

The second .. there are big public DNA databases, and they are adding more and more people every day

The third one seems the most important

Proven, documented genealogy, coupled with genetics, is the Holy Grail of medical and pharmaceutical research. It's worth billions, because it could hold the key to the cure for cancer and other diseases.

Because it's a powerful tool. You are your DNA, literally. And when a company has so many information about people, some other actor will want that information and becomes pricy.

Like instagram. Why did facebook paid 1 billion USD for a company that generated 0 revenue? For the amount of users and information they have.

And to twist a bit your question. Why is it so valuable AND sensible?

Because imagine in 10 years, you get a kid and he wants to get a job, and because you gave your DNA away to some random company, now owned by the biggest employer of your state, they do not hire him. The reason? He has 5% chance of developing a sickness which might drain the medical coverage of said employer.

We would be reduced to numbers and probabilities. Labels attached to our biology.

I am not sure DNA is that predictive...

I'm surprised Wikitree isn't mentioned in this thread anywhere. Its a nonprofit.

Can we not have our DNA information deleted on demand. At least within the EU it comes under GDPR.

Any leaks make ancestory responsible, that can be huge.

I coined a phrase about it:

"Anything that can be leaked, it eventually will."

Do any of these sources work for new immigrants?

Well this sounds nefarious. A group buddy buddy with governmental and NGO agencies owning ancestry. What could go wrong...

mistake. their data is trash. contains less than 1% of genome.

Yep, agreed. If you look at companies like Nebula Genomics [1] (disclosure: I'm a founder) or Dante Labs [2], they're doing whole genome sequencing for comparable prices. I'm not sure why we aren't seeing a more prevalent shift to next-gen seqencing. [1] https://nebula.org [2] https://dantelabs.com

Ah yes, a PEG purchasing a company. History has shown that this will obviously result in good things for the company!

Thought same: with covid depressed co’s the leveraged buyouts / peg activities driven by politically connected free cash is coming big time .. talent will get suckered into debt so these players take it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com