How DNA Site 23andMe Outed Parents Who Gave Up Their First Baby | Hacker News Reader

How DNA Site 23andMe Outed Parents Who Gave Up Their First Baby

forbes.com

52 pointstaylorbuley31 comments

Accusatory linkbait title. Makes it sound like it was publicly shown. The "outing" was a user of 23andMe confronting her mother. Also making this case less random was that the man who was adopted joined specifically to try and find out about his origins.

Finally, why not mention turning off the family finder feature as the first option, in the text below? Seems to be optimizing for sensationalism.

If you’re afraid to find hidden relatives in your closet, you might want to stay away from DNA sites, or use 23andMe and simply turn off its “family finder” feature — which is basically like Facebook’s friend finder, but using genetic code instead of email addresses.

Yeah, this is distorting. What happened was that two adults got their own genomes sequenced and discovered they were siblings and that their parents had hidden this fact. There was no privacy violated at all here, both of them had every right to this information.

There's traditionally been a view that parents who give babies up for adoption have a right to privacy, and not even the children, upon reaching adulthood, can retrieve that information. The main purpose of that policy is to encourage adoption over other alternatives, such as in earlier eras infanticide, and in more modern eras elective abortion. Now, technology makes it so that the children themselves can retrieve the information even if the state considers it private and won't divulge it. I tend to agree that this isn't doing anything wrong, but it unsettles the previous privacy status-quo and the policy that was based on it.

It's not just that one has to turn off Relative Finder. When I signed up for 23 and Me, I had to explicitly opt in to Relative Finder. And then I had to opt in again to finding any relatives closer than 2nd degree cousins, with a memorable warning section explaining that I might find out things I didn't want to know.

I'm a member of 23andMe. I have my mom's face and my dad's bad sense of humor, so there were no surprises when it was confirmed that they are my biological parents. :)

However! In order to see close relatives (anything closer than 4th cousins) you actually have to click a checkbox and confirm that you want to see who you're closely related to. And the other person has to also. 23andMe WARNS you that you might be surprised at the results.

So yeah. 23andMe is awesome, title is linkbait. You should disregard the silly article and become a customer of 23andMe, it's important to know your own genetics. It only costs 200 bucks-- compare that cost to future medical costs that you don't prepare for!

Apparently it is important for you to know your genetics, but it is ridiculous and maybe even pompous for you to say its important for me to know my genetics and join 23andme. If I do end up becoming a subscriber to a dna service it is not going to be for a couple years. I'd like to wait for the law to catch up with the technology and enjoy a significantly discounted price.

You leave your DNA so many places anyway... I figure if the gov. wanted it, they'd have it. Enjoying a discounted price makes sense though, and a lot of the genetics things don't become something to worry about until later in life.

I didn't mean to be pompous, I just wanted to counter the absurdity of the article.

I don't think I've seen a crime drama series yet that didn't, at some point, pull the old "here... have this soda while we wait" trick and then harvested the DNA from it after the perp was released. Those sneaky law men.

I am actually more worried about nefarious private sector actors using my DNA against me. There are countless ways that the private sector can use knowledge of my DNA against me.

First in line would be health insurances obviously, who would be very happy to increase your premium because of such-and-such genetic traits.

It's my understanding that that's already illegal in the US.

http://www.genome.gov/24519851

+State laws:

http://www.genome.gov/PolicyEthics/LegDatabase/PubSearchResu...

So you are saying I should not worry because nothing ever happens that is against the law?

I'm also very happy with 23andMe. It's really quite cheap, it has some cool ancestry visualizations, and it told me about some health risks I should pay attention to.

I think the privacy questions are overblown. I don't particularly feel like I "own" my DNA, anyway - I leave bits of it around everywhere I go, I share the majority of it with all the members of my species and the entirety of it with my family members. It seems like a fundamentally open-source aspect of nature.

It's still a very different scenario to specifically acquire a single targeted person's DNA which they left lying around, than to collect a massive database of millions of people's DNA that you can use to make all sorts of queries for whatever purpose you wish.

E.g. insurance companies wouldn't go through the trouble of following around their customers to catch their DNA, but they certainly would like to have that database which can predict their future illnesses.

Despite comparing people explicitly submitting their own DNA in order to search for traits or relations with law enforcement DNA matching, the article misses a pretty fundamental issue:

What access does law enforcement (or "The Government" agencies in general) to the 23&me and other commercial DNA databases? A quick skim of their ToS suggests the general "and everything necessary to comply with laws/court orders" clause, which sounds to me like you could drive a truck through it.

I think privacy issues such as that could be a pretty big stumbling block to mass adoption once price comes down (and utility via detectable traits goes up).

Can anyone shed more light on exactly what their T&C permit?

Edit: and, if it differs, what you think it should permit? I seem to recall from other situations that entirely speculative 'fishing expeditions' on databases are frowned upon, but the sheer benefit to LE faced with an unknown sample is massive, and bounded only by user adoption and their access.

It really doesn't matter what their TOS says; if the government wants the data it's just a NSL away. I guess they could promise to not voluntarily send your DNA to the government.

This is why I don't think the DNA revolution will truly happen until we're all carrying it around on our smart phones. There's a gold mine waiting for somebody who figures out how to do decentralized exchange and comparison of genetic information in a secure, peer to peer / aggregated fashion without requiring huge centralized databases.

“the government’s compelling interests to identify arrestees, solve past crimes, and exonerate innocent suspects] far outweigh arrestees’ privacy concerns.”

And therein lies a fundamental problem with the court system. At the end of the day, our hopes for "checks and balances" aside, the courts are part of the State, and they are going to - on average - protect the interests of the State over those of the individual.

You lose a lot of your rights once you become a convicted criminal (particularly a felon). It is no surprise that this would be one of them. Sometimes I think they should put more effort into publicizing all the stuff you have to give up if convicted of a crime. It might actual serve as a deterrent. Clearly the threat of being put in jail is not working as a deterrent.

In California they collect DNA at arrest, not conviction. Your DNA can be collected and stored in CODIS without your ever having been convicted of a crime.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/03/eff-again-reminds-cour...

http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/296.1.html

I read somewhere that you can petition to have it removed once charges are dropped. Not ideal since that sounds like a hassle. But it is an option nonetheless.

The article mentions "arrested for a felony" not "convicted". Obviously these are very different things, and it shouldn't be too hard to see why some people have a problem with people found innocent still having their privacy invaded, not to mention the incentives it gives authorities to arrest more people. It almost encourages 'fishing' by arresting people with little to no evidence (or on unrelated charges) to get the DNA sample, and then releasing them without pressing charges. Groups that already feel targetted by the police might be wary of policies which give incentives for making questionable or spurious felony arrests in order to get data for investigations into future or previous crimes.

Ah yes. It does say arrested. My bad. Still doesn't really concern me. Groups that already feel targeted by police also tend to over-exaggerate the possibility that maybe at some point in the future someone may misuse it.

From California Prop 69 in 2004 [1]:

Upon Enactment of Measure

• Adults and juveniles convicted of any felony offense.

• Adults and juveniles convicted of any sex offense or arson offense, or an attempt to commit any such offense (not just felonies).

• Adults arrested for or charged with felony sex offenses, murder or voluntary manslaughter (or the attempt to commit such offenses).

Additionally, Starting in 2009

•Adults arrested for or charged with any felony offense.

So we have 7-8 years of them getting DNA from people arrested for felony sex offenses, murder or voluntary manslaughter and 3-4 years of them getting DNA from people arrested for any felony. That should be enough data to draw some conclusions. Anybody have any studies to show the uptick in spurious felony arrests in California since Prop 69 passed in 2004? I would also expect to see a drastic shift from that small subset of offenses after 2009 when any felony arrest qualified since it would be a lot less risky to falsely arrest people for felonies far less important than sex crimes and murder (like tampering with a mail box or something stupid like that).

[1] http://www.lao.ca.gov/ballot/2004/69_11_2004.htm

If going to jail where you can get raped, beaten and killed does not work as a deterrent why would something less severe work as a deterrent?

Sometimes I think trying to solve the root cause of crime would be more effective than increasing the punishments.

Good point. Although not everyone ends up in the rapin', beatin' and killin' jails.

Twin adoption studies show that many influences on criminality are set at conception. Two of the biggies are intellect (IQ) and impulsivity/distractibility (ADHD).

Nonsense. Those "checks and balances" allow the people (states) to amend the constitution and override the courts.

Good luck with that.

Because no state has had a consitutional ammendment recently?

We should just start looking at DNA collection as piracy (since you aren't really losing your DNA... the law men are just sharing a copy of it). And don't we all love piracy around here? :)

23andMe has some very close connections to Google.

An affinity for collecting personal information on others runs in the family. ;)

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