Ancestry to paywall formerly free features included with DNA kit
easygenie.org
easygenie.org
I won't. I've compiled 25k names in Ancestry and am fairly fastidious in my family building. The dopamine comes from finding people/relationships that everyone else missed.
But I won't submit DNA to hurry that along and I try to talk anyone out of it I can.
The interval between introduction of cheap DNA and misuse by LEO was about 5 minutes. We now have a situation where one person creates risk for many family members. There are some incomplete safeguards in place but they will erode eventually.
That was enough to put me off at first but then came reports of comparing results between the big 3 or 4 DNA analyzers, with little-to-no agreement on origin.
I will grudgingly admit there's value in helping people who don't know their blood relatives - especially groups with few/no ancestral records (eg:African-Americans).
I even gained a nephew who was put up for adoption. But I don't think that pays for the eventual moment when bad actors (LEO, corps, etc) are routinely able to leverage our DNA against us.
At this point, I have five grandfathers. I also suspect that my birth mother has a recent NPE in her tree as well.
I've been working with a cousin who's a "DNA Angel" and she has some extremely strong views on who is a relative and who isn't. Her comments border on the offensive to me, someone who was adopted and loved by a family who aren't technically related to me, while my birth family has no legal claim or relation to me other than just being FB friends.
The melding of DNA and documentary evidence can be an extraordinary thing, and unlock all sorts of mysteries of the past for your family. It's interesting for me, when my ethnicity report is so cleanly delineated, that I can figure out which relatives I can't possibly be blood-related to, because of their country of origin, back to several centuries ago.
Neither can I. But sooner or later a relative is going to do one for fun, and then a massive chunk of the family tree's DNA is rooted.
We have ample evidence of what works for sites that contain what is essentially user-generated content. All social media sites, Wikipedia, Ancestry, numerous others. Gracenote/CDDB [1] was one of the earliest examples on the Internet. The model that works is Wikipedia.
This is all so painfully obvious when you examine such enterprises through the lens of the workers relationship to the means of production. Users here are the workers. They're creating the value in these sites. Without these workers these sites are worth nothing. Wikipedia works because it is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. This isn't quite being owned by the workers but it's a lot closer than any for-profit enterprise. Oh and simply being a non-profit doesn't solve the problem either.
Every social media site will go through this: increasing value extraction to maintain profits that will ultimately destroy the site. Ancestry isn't a socia media site but it follows the same pattern.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controvers...
Unfortunately, as soon as Ancestry mandated MFA for all accounts, I lost access to my father's. This was a good thing, because we weren't supposed to be sharing in the first place. But I also lost access to all those tools for research.
To add insult to injury, there are no export tools for getting your data out of Ancestry. It's a roach motel. So the only hope I have is screenshotting or printing the most important stuff, and rebuilding it somewhere better. I don't know where to go at the moment. I certainly can't afford service at the level my father is paying for Ancestry.
Don't let the smiling bastards gaslight you into thinking that's a good thing.
If Dad really wanted to help out my research, then he could've picked up the tab for my own subscription on my own account, which I do have.
It's not like Netflix where our recommendations would just be tossed in a blender. It's about trust and identity.
Actually I'm kind of tempted to set up a shared email for my wife and me for exactly things like that. She's already the main user of my Facebook account, where she goes on gardening groups or something.
Perhaps the account operators are comfortable with that, but what about their contacts?
Account sharing is explicitly against Terms of Service in certain cases. I know wives who run email accounts under their husband's name, and nobody's the wiser. I suppose that's alright for an intimate married couple.
Once on a mud long ago, one of the players had a persona as an attractive young woman, and she was known as one of the most active and wittiest people in our social circle. Then upon reaching a crisis, "she" admitted that her character had been alternately controlled by a woman and her live-in boyfriend, handing off whenever they saw fit. So some of us felt a little shaken by the deception. Of course we all knew from the start, that many "female" characters in the MUD world were not so in real life.
There was an MMOG I used to play where account sharing was forbidden, and quite bannable. I had worked many long hours on building a skill that would be useful to our whole group, and I let it be known that I would be available for anyone who wanted me to help out in that regard. Yet, the other leader maintained an alt character to sort of circumvent a game mechanic, and the idea is that we'd all share the credentials to log in to that alt account and use the character. I was livid, because that activity could've got them all banned by association, and also because they just didn't seem interested in the service I offered them. Oh well.
Seems like a license is needed where the data must be destroyed upon change in ownership or control (or regulatory equivilent).
As a genealogist, I would like (or rather, would have liked) to figure out certain things about my ancestry. It may be a man who married several times, and his children are known, but not which came from which wife - this is very common. Or it may be someone who suddenly appears in a place with no obvious relatives around - where did she come from? DNA can help solve such problems, but you need common descendants. As many as possible. Direct male and female lines are especially valuable.
Take the last case, the woman appearing out of nowhere. If you can find a direct female descendant of her, and you find someone who isn't, but has sufficiently similar mitochondrial DNA - they may be a direct female descendant of her sister. Genealogists use tricks like these to find connections that would otherwise be impossible to find from the documentary record.
But for it to work, you need a big database of people who have submitted their DNA. And they're currently all owned by sleazy and exploitative multinational companies with cozy relationships with government agencies. These companies also exploit that much of their customer base is elderly (and so both have more money, and are easier to milk as they don't have the expectations of younger people that "giving them your information should be more than enough payment" - which is after all how all social media sites run)
Some type of alien intervention, or time travel, obviously.
People here are blaming PE, but 23andMe is public and flaming-out on its own. Blackstone bought at the peak, so they're probably taking a big loss on this, and this will just speed it up.
If it's over how law enforcement is using the data, the cat's out of the bag regardless of what you do. If it's future genetic discrimination, for once, regulators seem to be on top of things.
Someone prove me wrong, please.
It requires investigations and evidence and it metes out fines for non-compliance, eventually.
A fine doesn't reverse stolen/hacked data, nor does it work particularly well on the megacorps who just eat it as the cost of doing business.
If there is more profit to be had than it would cost in fines then that's not a deterrent, its a tax.
Until the fines are proportionate to the offence (whatever the profit is/was + punitive percentage) it's only going to deter those who can't pay the current fixed rates.
Optionally you can get access to the results if you pay more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
I suppose that doesn't help with finding relatives by DNA though. I can think of a few ways to maybe do a public database that could hash DNA samples...if you submit a sample that's close enough to someone else it would unlock some contact details. That would be vulnerable to brute forcing, so there would still need to be a way for both parties to verify each others DNA before exchanging real names and other info. If that could be solved though, it would make services like Ancestry.com obsolete.
Doesn't exactly inspire trust in this company's willingness and ability to protect extremely personal information.
I'm fast losing my faith in the free market because of this handful of companies who are quite obviously incompetent or outright evil.
Doesn't always work.
Does this concern anyone else, that in some not too distant future, ads etc could be DNA targeted?
Or dropped from insurance.
You might be OK with the risk but are you willing to decide for you children who might grow up in a potentially very different society?
You have certain markers for certain mental health issues? Thank you for your application but the position has already been filled. Health insurance? We run a background check and unfortunately we are not able to make you an offer.
People that say you will not be discriminated for your DNA because such discrimination is not legal are absolutely delusional.
Not to mention people are still straight being murdered in some parts of the world for having the wrong ethnicity. Things can change very fast in your country.
(The license from Pantone to Adobe expired and things happened)
The second you see politicians like Bernie sanders endorsing them as some sort of lifelong goal they wanted you should automatically get a red flag about it.
Also, do not do this to your relatives, imagine they detect a disease in you ut the gene is not active but your brother/sister did not take the test but has the disease due to how genetics work, now who is to say a company won't get that data or health services and simply not give them anything? Just curiosity about your ancestry is not enough to justify giving your genetic data to a company, please do not use your instagram brain for something that might heavily influence you in a bad way in the future.
You could make this argument about anyone who lost money in 2008, a bank going bust or fell for any kind of fraud.
‘Should have done more research, made better choices’
https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/blackstone-completes-a...
And there it is