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Comment by pointlessone | Hacker News Reader

One of the services they provide is giving you reports on new genetic studies and how it relates to your DNA. Another is online genome browser. Both require access to your genome. If you only want to sequence your DNA you can do that, download your files and delete your account. They promise to delete your genome once you close your account.

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It's interesting to imagine how this would've worked in 1995 or something, if the sequencing was possible. You'd have done the sample, and in response they'd send you three CD-ROMs. The first is the visualizer program which you'd install as an executable. The other discs are your genome*. If your spouse or kid got their genome sequenced, you'd get two more discs.

Every year the company would print an update to the disease database on more CDs, and make them available for a relatively small price, probably exclusively by mail.

Obviously there's some aspects of this that suck, but it's interesting to see how it's so much better for privacy, because data hoarding wasn't viable at scale or as a business.

* Two, because a genome is > 700MB, so it won't fit on a single disc. How annoying the size limit of a CD would've been if you had to solve this problem at work!

Depending on format your genome can be upwards of 100 GB. Granted they probably don't use full sequencing for analysis. They probably use just genetic variants, which is about 300 MB, so would fit a single CD.

I imagine a couple of floppies a year might've been cheaper in 1995 than a CD.

> Two, because a genome is > 700MB, so it won't fit on a single disc.

I would hope it compresses well (lots of repeating stuff), though I have no practical experience.

Those things you can do locally as well, you might just need an update from time to time to make new analyses available. At least unless they require doing statistics or whatnot on all the genomes they have.

Depending on format full sequencing can be larger than 100 GB. It's possible to keep that locally on most devices but it's a sizeable chunk of storage for relatively rarely used data.

They do use statistics in their reports. One of the numbers they give with each report is where you are in the population for that particular report. E.g. 85th percentile for this thing in the population.

$10 USB flash drive.

Do they promise not to share the information with third parties who won't delete my genome when I close my account?

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