Hacker News Reader

Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

They do have it but they probably have millions of accounts that were created before that feature and never logged back in and set it up. It's also through an auth app and not texts which is more secure but more of a hassle for not allowing users which might affect adoption.

View on HN

It is very inexpensive to check your customer passwords against HIBP [1] or strongly encourage MFA. They choose not to.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/Key

(23andme customer using Apple SSO, have strong opinions on customer IAM, passwords must die)

Doesn't that require you to know the password in plaintext?

Depending on your use case and implementation details, not necessarily.

https://www.troyhunt.com/understanding-have-i-been-pwneds-us...

.. can't those old accounts be flagged to require email verification to log in ?

Oh, you lost your email account access? Please send a matching DNA sample and $99 to unlock your account.

I mean, 23andme has one of the ultimate methods of account recovery available to it. (ignoring that people tend to leave copies of their DNA everywhere, but then you could just mail that in under a John Doe and find out all the same info anyway).

It could be easier and cheaper for some to get someone's hair or saliva than cloning a SIM card...

My point of view here is someone that’s lost their access to 23andme, not using it for SSO for other services.

While I get the social media aspects of 23andme, if one can get your DNA, they could submit that to 23andme and find out everything you already knew.

I wonder how they handle duplicate submissions?

The Facebook way...sign up with email, get instantly restricted, need to verify with a mobile number to unlock.

Whatever way you put this, handling the support load of the few customers who can't log in - and by this argument aren't ever logging in anyway - is better than having this degree of PII leaked and the company reputation ruined.

Most old accounts would probably never try to log in again anyway. After you learn that you're 3/64-ths Irish you've gotten what you wanted, why log in again?

Yeah I know there's the whole genetic disorder screening thing which might receive more updates in the future, but I think most of their customers probably did this for the novelty of knowing where they came from.

> created before that feature

Which feature? Unless they didn't ask their user's email (which I'd find surprising), they could have added e-mail based TFA any day without asking their users to do anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com