DNA testing company vanishes along with its customers' genetic data
malwarebytes.com
malwarebytes.com
https://hoodline.com/2024/11/23andme-in-turmoil-stock-plunge...
In the current single vendor model. An intermediary could accept the samples, blind identities, then provide a "one time" mechanism for retrieving results.
Bill Burr's take was pretty good. "What.. I'm going to spit in a tube and mail it into the internet?"
- state level actors can basically break into any computer system given enough time
- corporate databases have a gigantic amount of information on everyon
- states want all of that data
I hope the conclusion is as straightforward as it seems to me.
OK, not exactly what you are responding about Let's talk about corporate IT systems, let's get into "deleted". Is it:
- deleted from backups? Almost universally this answer will be no.
- deleted from each and every database and system in your presumably huge corporation, which may involve literally thousands of IT systems? I'd guess no.
- is it deleted by moving the data to a separate "deleted data" table or database, thus sequestering the data from the "active data" rather than deleting it, just in case you want to "undo"?
- is it deleted from all system logs?
- is it deleted from all records systems that may have minimum retention periods legally or by policy?
- what about data warehouses or data lakes that repackage/mirror data?
I'd accuse you too. If you can't read their data, then the data doesn't exist? Also, if you can't read read their data, how are the customers seeing it on their dashboard?
In the automotive space we are leaning heavily on confidential computing primitives to make it actually impossible, for example keys generated entirely inside enclaves and only attested software can run on those etc etc.
And of course we did that not because we are nice people (though we belive we are). We did it, because we had the hypothesis that a reputation to handle the user-data with proofable utmost respect to security and privacy would be more valuable than having access to this data.
People not believing us or accusing us of lying obviously defy that hypothesis.
"request"
People get DNA tests for their dogs.
For example, there are tens of millions of people in Africa and Latin America who unknowingly have mixed ancestry and will be labeled in the data set as being "from X country."
That will mean the dataset thinks European genes might indicate Latin American descent or vice versa.
In my case, my mother told me. But I could have also learned that from a DNA test. (Which I have since taken. As a result, I now know the identity of my biological father.)
It is not uncommon for DNA tests to reveal misattributed parentage — something you could almost-never learn from records-based genealogical research.
My point, though, was that using birth and death records to trace your ancestry is not always reliable.
Determining whether people are genetically similar is indeed well-studied. The problem is saying with certainty that you know where their ancestors lived.
There are a few ways the results end up being inaccurate, and they apply to all the companies.
The first and most important is that the data is from where people live now or in the very recent past (as I alluded earlier). That means they can only tell you how closely-related you are to people in a certain geographic area, whether those people have been there for 100 years or 1,000 years.
The second is that the data sets are filled with mostly European data, so anyone with even a bit of non-European ancestry is going to have less-accurate results[1] presented to them with a misleading degree of confidence.
The third is that there isn't an objectively "correct" algorithm for determining if someone is from one place or another. Every company has their own, which is why people get (sometimes wildly) different results from different companies.[2][3]
And the fourth is that the data collection doesn't seem to be especially accurate, perhaps related to the quantity or variety of SNPs that the testing company collects data about.
> Above you said "ex has a doctorate in genetics".
Correct. And the same way I take climate scientists' word for it that climate change is happening, instead of getting 10 degrees in different fields and gathering data myself, I understood her explanation and trust her expertise. Being a science consumer is always about trusting other people who have done the research, not about learning it all yourself and gathering your own data.
If you can find someone with a doctorate in genetics who has no affiliation with testing companies and believes these tests accurately tell someone where their ancestors were from, I'd be happy to consider the counterpoint. I have never seen such a thing in my research.
Regardless, all of the commercial operations have given twins differing results, so we can be fairly certain that any accurate way of determining genealogy from DNA has not been commercialized.
These tests, however, are good for finding relatives or determining how closely-related two people are.
1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/previous-genetic-association...
2. https://www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-...
3. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/28/18194560/an...
BTW, the main reason african genomic inference is so complicated is not the lack of genomic data, but rather that africa itself has far higher genetic diversity than any other continent, due to populations (whose genomes we can infer!) moving and interbreeding for a long time before humans left africa and spread out to the rest of the world.
(Article #1 is correct, there are definitely populations for which our current models are inaccurate due to bias and underlying complexity. I am not disagreeing with any of that).
(Article #2, where an individual compared the results, shows that the results are nearly identical, and well within the expected accuracy of the tests)
(Article #3 isn't interesting- yes, 23&Me and other companies have marketed truly terrible ideas. That doesn't mean IBD is scientifically invalid. The article also strawmans many of the realities underlying the nature of the tests and their relationship to disease prediction, or any other phenotype of interest).
You're saying it's possible to accurately determine how closely related individuals (and even groups) are.
I agree.
But you can't determine where those individuals' ancestors lived at any given time unless you also have historical data. Land does not imprint upon DNA.
So these companies can tell me that I have many distant cousins in, say, Brazil and Portugal, and we can make an inference that I'm of Portuguese descent. But clear-cut situations like that are extremely rare unless good genealogy records are kept as well and can be combined with genetic testing.
But those services can still be useful to find an unknown branch of relatives when the ancestor who had emigrated in a different country didn't let any info regarding their previous life.
They are subject to FZ 152, Russian equivalent of GDPR, as well as DNA-specific regulations which AFAIR are more strict. Not sure though if they care about foreign users.
Submitted with no discussion (11 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42096208
(But links to where there are interesting comments are super valuable, so please don't stop with those!)