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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

> I never personally understood that

It’s a pretty simple cost/benefit equation.

For 90%+ of people, the benefit (or appeal) of seeing an ancestry report is greater than the cost (or risk) of handing over your DNA.

That said, it’s definitely fair to question why more people don’t take their personal privacy seriously. The reality is companies like Google (and 23andme) simply wouldn’t exist if everyone cared as much about privacy as the HN crowd. Google exists because consumers are fine with sharing their data, for better or worse.

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I am extremely skeptical that many people are making an informed cost/benefit here. I would wager most users don’t even know about the license terms.

It’s the same as infosec in general. Most people don’t know about the risks, and anyway are bad at quantifying tail risk.

You don't need to know the license terms to know what is happening. Just observe that you get ads based on browsing and searching behavior. Most people can see that it's happening and don't care. Or at least not enough to give up the value they get in exchange.

I agree most folks aren't aware of the risks. But I'm guessing for the vast majority of people that are aware of the risks, the thought process is basically along the lines of:

1. I'm simply not that important. There are millions of other people who have given this data to 23 and me and the like, and I'm just some rando peon - nobody is going to be specifically searching for my DNA.

2. The "worst case scenarios", e.g. getting health insurance denied because you have some gene, still seem implausible to me. Granted, there is a ton of stuff I thought would be implausible 5-10 years ago that is now happening, but something like this feels like it would be pushed back against from all sides of the political spectrum, even in our highly polarized world.

3. I haven't murdered anyone, so I'm not worried about getting caught up in a DNA dragnet. Sure, there can be false positives, but to get on in life you pretty much have to ignore events with low statistical probability (or otherwise nobody would even get in a car on the road, and that has a much higher statistical probability of doing you harm).

What if someone in your family has done a crime, and the result of your DNA being online is (1) you are the first suspect and (2) the criminal might well learn/suspect that they have been compromised through you?

Isn't it better for society as a whole if criminals are apprehended?

Even moreso if they're one that would be a physical threat like you're suggesting?

Yes, assuming the label of who is a “criminal” is fair.

There is always the risk of a society or government changing that definition after they have the data and it’s too late to go back.

Depends on the crime. They aren't exactly fungible acts. Furthermore the state isn't exactly obligated to manage society, even if this has occurred in various forms throughout history. Many of our laws weren't exactly written with "society's" best interest at heart. Ultimately, the state will look after itself above all else.

I'm just saying I'd like the state to have to work hard to put people away. The law can just as easily be wielded to harm people. I don't see much sign the american public agrees with me, and politicians certainly don't agree. Even mr "it's a witch hunt" trump is only anti-LEO when it comes to his own crimes. But I'd rather have some low background level of crime than the sinking feeling that we're imprisoning a lot of innocent people, as unpopular a sentiment it might be to some in this country.

Besides, if the government doesn't take care of society, higher crime is inevitable.

Mustyosi, your DNA was found on a coffee cup at a Denny’s frequented by terrorists destroying Tesla property. Where were you on Tuesday at 2?

“Zoom and enhance” forensics aren’t real right? Isn’t it mostly NSA listens in and then they have to parallel construct something to hide the illegal pervasive surveillance?

Pretty much all of forensics isn't real. Blood splatter analysis, polygraphs, fingerprinting. That doesn't mean it doesn't put people in jail.

What, specifically, are you claiming is “not real” about fingerprinting?

There's a common belief that fingerprint analysis is objective and reliable, but there's a great deal of subjectivity involved. Additionally, there have been several convictions involving fingerprints as evidence which were eventually overturned.

While they may still be useful, they have an image of infallibility that doesn't line up with reality.

  Their use as evidence has been challenged by academics, judges and the 
  media. There are no uniform standards for point-counting methods, and 
  academics have argued that the error rate in matching fingerprints has 
  not been adequately studied and that fingerprint evidence has no secure 
  statistical foundation. Research has been conducted into whether experts 
  can objectively focus on feature information in fingerprints without 
  being misled by extraneous information, such as context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint

Spooky23, the atoms in your heart all quantum tunneled out of your body causing your untimely death. Why didn't you install a backup heart?

There are many instances of people being questioned, harassed, and even framed based on circumstantial evidence. Western judicial systems are specifically engineered to address these problems via the process of discovery and adversarial argument. There has never been any documented instance of a death being caused by quantum tunnelling.

I think your example highlights why most people don't view these as plausible concerns:

1. If I had a family member who was a serial murderer or rapist a la the Golden State Killer, I would want him apprehended.

2. "the criminal might well learn/suspect that they have been compromised through you?" That doesn't seem reasonably plausible enough to me to care. What, cousin Billy Bob is going to come hold me hostage because he knows I used 23 and me at some point? Really??

> 1. If I had a family member who was a serial murderer or rapist a la the Golden State Killer, I would want him apprehended.

But you are apprehended instead and are responsible for now coming up with an alibi.

That is not how dna evidence works in my understanding. They would know if you are a partial match or a complete match.

Very unlikely things can happen, sure, but they can just as well be positive:

What if an unknown biological relative of mine happens to be a billionaire and gifts me $10M like he does for all his other relatives?

> The "worst case scenarios", e.g. getting health insurance denied because you have some gene, still seem implausible to me.

We're halfway there, data mining by insurances already is the norm in car insurance. We should have fought back hard back in the day this was proposed.

> I haven't murdered anyone, so I'm not worried about getting caught up in a DNA dragnet. Sure, there can be false positives, but to get on in life you pretty much have to ignore events with low statistical probability

Even if you haven't murdered anyone or intend to to so - your genetic data is useful in the pig dragnet. Your genetic data may be what provides the pigs with a link to your nephew who moonlights as a graffiti sprayer... and yes, the German pigs are doing DNA checks on graffiti sprayers, they have been doing so for over two decades [1].

[1] https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article398332/Graffiti-Erstma...

Just a suggestion: if your goal is to convince the average Joe why DNA privacy is a concern, and you solely refer to the police multiple times as "pigs", you're not going to persuade many people.

If the pigs don't want to be referred to as pigs any more, they should push their unions to fight for yeeting the bad apples out of the force for good instead of just hiring those who behaved so utterly braindead that IA had no choice but to yeet them in the next town.

At the moment pigs can break the law and abuse their authority any way they please with barely any chance of getting even a slap on the wrist - and even if they kill someone, chances are high they'll either get off entirely on "reasonable fear" or they'll get pardoned.

Sure, but the audience for 'being aware of DNA privacy' is not the police, but normal citizens, particularly a good number of people who, despite the abuse, are a general good in society.

You're free to call the police whatever you want. But that's not what my comment was about.

Again, if your goal is to convince people (or at least have a constructive dialogue) why they should care about genetic privacy, all you have done for your average person is convince them even more that your opinion should be discounted.

Ever make bug because you wrote code thinking about how you wanted it to work and forgot to consider how it could go wrong off of that happy path? I think things like this are basically the same problem: when someone is focused on the good outcome it’s just not the right context for most people to carefully evaluate possible negative events, especially low-probability ones. They’re thinking it’d be cool to get an ancestry report, maybe lifesaving to get notice of genetic problem, perhaps the excitement of a unknown relative, and unless there’s a neutral party involved the positives are probably going to win.

I am adopted. I spent most of my life having absolutely no idea whatsoever where I was from, or what biological risk factors I might have. 23andme was valuable to me on many levels, and even with the state the company currently finds itself in, it is not a decision I regret.

My wife also did 23andme some years ago, through which she discovered she had Factor V Leiden—a fact which became extremely important very soon after her discovering it, leading directly to changes in her treatment and how closely they monitored her for blood clots (she had a PFO and some other stuff going on that was already compounding her risk of clotting and stroke), and very possibly may have saved her life.

I’m supposed to go in and delete every trace of it out of fear of what the down-on-their-luck company might, or simply could, do?

While I know that my experience might be rare, I would regardless suggest that you reserve your skepticism, because you aren’t really in a position to assess who did or did not derive a justifiable amount of value from it or how informed of a human being they are

Your experience may be unique but I don't think it's exactly rare.

I'm just another random anecdote, but I also found I had Factor V Leiden through 23 and me. Also, I'm gay, and for a long time was the only gay person I knew in my extended family. Through 23 and me I discovered a 2nd cousin who also is gay, and I met him in real life and it was an incredibly meaningful and important experience in my life.

One of my good friends discovered her biological half-brother on 23andMe who she had never been told about. They met up, and got along remarkably well, and have actually remained pretty close since! These things do happen. Glad you got something out of it, too.

Yeah, these experiences may or may not be rare. I was positing that they might be rare mostly to try to meet the person I was responded to halfway and because I don't actually have evidence one way or the other

While perhaps not as immediately "positive" an experience, there was a bunch of press last year about how consumer DNA tests were uncovering that incest was much more common than previously believed:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests...

That’s definitely interesting to learn you are the great great son of an incest !

Did you find out your cousin was gay through 23 and me or from him?

This is not the sort of thing a genetic test can determine

Give it time...

It might not happen. Fingerprints are partly heritable – immigration delay disease, for example, has an identifiable point mutation – but you'd be laughed out of the room if you tried to suggest that given time, we would eventually be able to predict fingerprints from genomes.

Non-heterosexual behaviour can be observed in most social amniotes, even those without fingerprints. Genetically-identical twins do not have identical sexual proclivities. There's no a priori reason to believe there's even a "gay gene" to find.

I looked it up, and twin studies say sexual orientation is party genetic, but it's far from the only factor.

So at most a perfect genetic test could give a percentage chance of someone being gay/straight.

I guess that's pretty much what you said.

And either gayness is evolutionarily beneficial (kin selection?), or it's so fundamental to amniote psychology that evolution can't get rid of it. (Or both, I guess.)

IIRC, his first and last name were visible to me in 23 and me, so I googled him and saw that we was a therapist with a focus on the LGBT community, so then I messaged him through 23 and me, told him a bit of my story and asked him if he was gay.

Genetic testing isn’t the exclusive realm of 23andme, you can get it done through a medical provider as well who doesn’t have such privacy-violating terms.

Right now, yes. But early in 23andMe's history (I got it done at the very beginning) they were pretty much the only game in town. They were the first to make such a service widely accessible to the public, and they helped establish the market in which better alternatives would eventually emerge.

I don't tell anyone now to use 23andMe specifically, but the warnings and risks being discussed here apply to existing customers, to people who have already done it, and I am just speaking as one of those people.

How does genetic testing help connect with biological relatives - that only works if there's a database people signed up to ?

If you're talking about finding specific biological ancestors (names) then yes.

But certain general ancestral data can be deduced from variations in your DNA that are observed in some known current/historical population. I.e, I share much in common with people sampled from Scotland -> I must be Scottish.

People are warned not to put much trust into the ethnicity estimates, sometimes even by the services themselves. Telling western Europeans apart is hard.

It's either matching to specific people in the service's reference group who have declared that they are Scottish, or it's trying to guess based on the mix of ancestral populations 2000+ years ago ("western hunter gatherer", "early Neolithic farmer" etc.)

Maybe for those in the US, or at least parts of it. If there's an option for the other 8 billion people that's at least as good as 23andme from a medical perspective, I think a lot of people on HN would be very interested to learn about it.

Similar situation, I did a number of tests( ancestry, myheritage, 23andme, etc) the information it provided answered many questions, and introduced people I never would have expected to my family tree (half brother/sister, etc).

23andme had little data on my fathers side so it split my mothers side into my family tree at the great grandfather level. I spent awhile tracing people only to discover my father and mother side seemed to be related. After going on Ancestry I was able to figure the mistake.

Myheritage had European links. 23andme North American links. Ancestry had everything. The genetic time period they match against are different. 23andme matches against 100ad while ancestry 1200ad. So if you are Celtic perhaps your people were in Spain in 100ad but in Ireland or Scotland by 1200. Using different services gives you a fuller picture and understanding of human migration and your migration. The difference from 23andme telling you you are broadly northwestern european vs Cornish/Welsh/Scottish is huge but illustrates what you match against really changes your identity.

I get the medical angle, but I cannot understand why it would matter to know that some distant ancestor may be from scotland. Is that really worth turning over your detailed biological build plan with all its flaws to some shady cooperation?

Do you have any examples of people being harmed, or are you just spreading FUD?

Try reading some on history from the 1940s, ask yourself if that might happen again, and reevaluate what your parent post says.

I worry more about Google, Facebook, mobile apps, cell phones tracking location, interests, activities putting it together for others to buy.

These tests do not do a full detailed analysis if you want that you need to find a clinic and pay thousands of dollars. For what they do tell you I wouldn't be afraid for the entire world to see.

Discovering who you are, where you came from, discovering who your relates are, what your last name is, where people with your genes live now, the backstory on how your wave of immigration came and where they settled and why has been worth it.

The information exposed by 21andme was profile and ethnicity information. I'm okay with any of that becoming public, the public part of a facebook profile shares personal data. Actually I wish more people would ask me about my ethnicity data. I think it would make a great addition as a facebook profile section and if facebook still allowed developers to create profile addons I would create one.

As an aside does anyone remember catbook addon?

> profile and ethnicity information. I'm okay with any of that becoming public

You are probably aware that at least two European countries no longer collect this information, and the reasons for introducing this policy?

Not aware or the reasoning. I looked it up. This article talks about the countries that do and don't.. why black lives matter is protesting in Germany over it.

https://qz.com/2029525/the-20-countries-that-dont-collect-ra...

My guess would be to protect European identity from the reality. Europe has a different level of acceptance of foreigners and a history to protect. I can accept their compromise because of their political situations.

In Canada it's promoted. In the US it gets combined into American identity and promoted in Europe it's hidden.

GP is not assessing who did or did not, he's expressing valid scepticism about proportion of people that give the issue much though being any high.

You being a sample of one doesn't give you any position either, but I won't be suggesting reserving your enthusiasm.

Your descendants are now uninsureable for thrombosis related ailments ?

Uninsurable where? In the US most people get their insurance through group policies, either through their employer or through the government marketplace. Life insurance companies might be able to make use of your DNA information to alter rates, but I don't see how medical insurance would be able to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...

The very link you’re sharing says it doesn’t apply to life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance.

Quite right. The comment to which I replied said, "I don't see how medical insurance would be able to do so" and I was adding a data point.

Shouldn’t people predisposed to speeding pay more for car insurance?

Are you actually condoning this practice?

Speeding is a choice, one that's extremely easy to change, and it ultimately an exceedingly trivial matter.

You are born with your genetics, and you can’t change them. You are them. They will likely impact how and you die. All you can do is be aware of them so you can try to be proactive.

So there’s really no comparison between that and voluntarily driving a car too fast

If that’s genuinely how it worked, where the more health problems you are at risk for, the more money you have to pay, this would result in the people who already have the shittiest stuff to deal with in their lives having that compounded by also having to pay more than everybody else.

Not sure what more needs to be said, but if there is anyone out there who is unconvinced, I probably won’t be inviting them to dinner parties anytime soon

Is it fair that life insurance for 90 year olds is rather expensive? Yes, because the foremost purpose of insurance is the quantification and management of uncertain risk.

If someone has a higher probability of getting sick / dieing / getting in a wreck then the risk is different and should be priced accordingly. If you don’t, you’re not taking about insurance anymore. You’re talking about a wealth transfer system where good drivers subsidize the bad.

Tomato tomato. It's insurance on a societal level - the guarantee that your children, for example, will still be able to afford a medical policy the same as everyone else can even if they lose the genetic or developmental or whatever other lottery.

There's no divine directive that states that risk sharing must be done by voluntarily joining a pool run by a private entity that's priced uniquely per individual. That's merely one way to go about it.

To be fair it's the only sensible way for a private entity to go about it in the absence of legislation that prevents others from being more efficient. In the case of the US specifically, as long as everyone is forced to play by the same "inefficient" rules the free market will continue to work.

No? Speeding tickets I can see the justification for, but to implement this they do this kind of thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...

Speaking of practices which ought to be illegal but somehow aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...

Another DEI measure inhibiting the free meerkatly goodness soon to go?

I'm totally with you on the value prop at the time we signed up. I was more surprised that it sounds like you are reluctant to delete now, when the company is going through an unpredictable transition.

Did I get that right? If so, is there an ongoing value you want to maintain, or it more out of respect for the organization that provided you value in the past?

Does "infomed cost/benefit" mean "agree with my opinion"? How much information does someone need to show they understand? Do you know the lcense terms to every service you use? certainly not, so applying this standard only when it's your field of expertise is extremely biased.

Most people haven't died or had their bank account drained due to bad opsec, so I'm guessing they are accurately assessing the risk as "could be worse". There are so many things that could kill you day to day that people rightly don't care about your pet issue.

I think most people do the cost benefit analysis in a much more empirical manner than your theoretical framework. Most everybody has a justifiable reinforced belief that trading data for value is worth it, since the vast majority of people don't feel like they've been on the losing side when they participated in these transactions before.

One can argue that these people may not have understood that a transaction was occurring. I would argue that this is beside the point. Their intuition is hard to discredit in the face of their lived experience. Aside from the marketing spam, most people are probably right in thinking that they've been better off with Google/<alternative> than without.

We can pontificate that people should know more about what they agreed to, and so on, if only they knew better, etc. But this rings hollow and very hypothetical to the vast majority of us. It's worrisome in thought exercises, but not validated in real life.

In my experience, even if people knew, they just don't care.

Most people I talk to about this, tech and non-tech folk have an attitude with a.mix of "you can't escape this anyway, so might as well embrace it" and "misuse scenarios you are describing are pretty far-fetched".

I read a comment on Hacker News which suggested asking these people to provide you with their unlocked phone. The theory went that most people wouldn’t do it because they realize that they do actually have things they would prefer to be kept private or secure. The first time I tried this, the person I was trying it with unlocked her phone and handed it to me. I didn’t even know how to respond.

I guess open a social media app and post a PM accidentally in public, like:

Hi Laszlo, I'm making the trip on Friday, we can meet at 10 and you can put the stuff in my purse, it should be fine. Don't forget the jewels, that's the only reason I'm doing this.

People worry about "real people" knowing their private stuff, eg a family member, acquaintance, colleague, neighbor etc peeking into their DMs, because these people can impact one's actual life, social life, reputation, job, marriage, etc. They don't care if some faceless corporation has their data in some database with a billion other peoples similar data, as long as that data can't get into the hands of real flesh-and-bone humans that they see with their two eyes in real life as opposed to theoretically maybe existing and doing something nebulous ly nefarious in some scifi future dystopia.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but the data belonging to a faceless corporation (or even a government agency) can be dangerous even if the corporation does not have any nefarious intentions; this is because both the data and the corporation can eventually be compromised by malicious actors.

I personally am careful like others around here, but I know how normal people think. All anybody can list are vague nebulous future consequences while the benefits are immediate and concrete. You need to point to concrete bad things that happened to real people close to home, eg friends and family, for them to care. Not one anomalous case across the country, but something that has reality in their own real lives. I've tried telling people about privacy issues and it's harder than telling people to stop smoking or eating crap food, or to abstain from sex etc. It's seen as theoretical, abstract moral preaching. Privacy advocates can never point to real things that affect average people in big enough numbers. It's a bit of a catch 22. If the thing is too rare, it seems far fetched. If it's too common, it's seen as "if so many people are affected then I can just blend into the crowd". Meaning, since everyone is careless about privacy around them, at worst they are all going down together. But that in itself seem quite far fetched.

I’d say it was a mix of both for me, combined with being younger and having an “uneven” privacy perception. This said, besides being annoyed, I can’t really tell what the impact is because I can’t even quantify the amount of information (e.g. “resolution”) to the possible uses of that information.

Perhaps this could be solved with a class action law suit, that would make it illegal for private entities to own the data post fact, combined with how it was marketed, etc. I’ve seen interest rates for credits reverted this way and credits reduced, for similar reasons. But again, it’s a trade off here too :)

It’s not about “the HN crowd”, it’s just that the time has changed so much. Do you remember 2008? Facebook was a swanky way back then to reconnect with your classmates and leave some “Like” things under their wedding photos. Google was seen as a way of organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful, with their niche ad service being still in limited beta. Twitter was so unknown that it still hasn’t even won a Webby Award.

And 23andMe was already offering a $100 DNA sampling in 2008.

It’s easy to be cynical about this in 2025. Those who didn’t live through the early 2000s, can’t even imagine the amount of optimism surrounding the tech industry at that time. Giving my DNA to a cool new Silicon Valley firm in 2008? Sure, why not, it was like buying a ticket to some utopian future.

I remember 2008. It was the same thing as now. The majority of people just want what they want, useful or shiny, and don't care about the rest. Remember how many signed up for housing loans they couldn't pay back, knew they disn't have the money, but it was cool and everyone else was doing it? Same thing, roughly. Was the case then and will be now.

Your comment made me think of other companies we view as (mostly) “good” today.

E.g. tons of people take Uber/Lyft with no consideration about how those companies can take your travel history and daily schedule to monetize or sell to 3rd parties.

DoorDash - what if they start selling my order history to insurance companies as a variable to predict obesity/mortality?

HN/Reddit - what if some LLM scrapes all my comments, de-anonymizes me, and sells that info to a data broker?

Visa/Mastercard - what if 100% of my credit card history is sold to data brokers? (Spoiler, it already often is!)

Just trying to illustrate that even in 2025, we pick and choose what to view through rose colored glasses and what to frown upon.

In the example of Uber/Lyft, I willingly give up my home address and even let me know every time I’m out of town! (Trips to airport) yet that seemingly doesn’t cross my mind when requesting a ride.

I don’t disagree with your comment, but IMO what was true in 2000’s is still true today: people overlook risks of things when the benefits are substantial enough. That’s human nature

All of your what-ifs are almost certainly already happening, and probably worse.

Right, but it doesn’t seem to deter us for some reason. At least not yet.

So you walked into a French restaurant in the 16th century every week and there was an artist sitting outside and the proprietor took notes on every conversation you had and the artist made portraits from everything you were wearing every week and they all sold it down the river.

The shopkeeper knows your face and every baguette you ever purchased three times a week. Every miller within 300 km knows about that time you complained about the stale bread they sold you.

What is the big diff and nobody needs high tech to compromise your privacy

I lived through the early 2000s and it was already pretty easy to see how 23andme could go wrong. Unlike data that could leak from a company like Google or Facebook, your DNA is forever associated with you and can't be changed or obfuscated. IIRC, many on HN made the same point at the time.

Elsewhere in this discussion there are people talking about how "the common man" doesn't understand the risks of privacy loss. Well it really doesn't help that when those risks materialize you also have people claiming "well no one could have seen that coming".

In fairness the "common man", if they are anything, is unable to think more than about a month or two ahead on a good day. So while anyone with an unusual ability to plan long term could, did and does see problems on the horizon the common man certainly couldn't have picked it.

(Nitpick: the "Like" button was invented by FriendFeed, which was acqui-hired by FB, and Facebook implemented the "Like" button in 2009.)

FB had an internal version that predated the FriendFeed one although it wasn’t launched till later. I don’t know what you consider “invented” in the context of silly internet features but that’s the history.

The invention I mean is that when user X likes a post of user Y, the liked post of Y is included into the feeds of users who follow user X. I don't remember this mechanic prior to Friendfeed and then FB. Maybe I'm just unaware of prior art.

> The reality is companies like Google (and 23andme) simply wouldn’t exist if everyone cared as much about privacy as the HN crowd. Google exists because consumers are fine with sharing their data, for better or worse.

This refrain is repeated endlessly but I've never heard a good argument as to why it must be this way and if it was any other way Google simply couldn't exist in any (ideally better) form.

Which Google product out of the many[0] do you know that doesn't scrape data?

I think Google profits massively off of the ignorance of its users and is reliant on their unawareness that they're producers of actual relevant data.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Google the search engine could exist without being a privacy pest. But once Google bought DoubleClick in 2002 and made their ad delivery platform their own, going down the panopticon path became inevitable.

I agree generally, but I was under the impression they had explicitly committed to ads over other revenue forms much earlier. Importantly, there was a point in Google's history where they weren't committed to this, and the internet would look a lot different had they not just determined ads would be sufficient for their business model.

Curiously, they had a solution of sorts in a program where you could basically bid for your own ad buys to remove ads from pages. For some reason they shuttered this program down. I didn't even know it existed until after it was gone, frustratingly. I thought it was a neat way to allow the industry bridge to other funding models.

(Or perhaps such a business model relies on tracking that's been deemed invasive. Who knows.)

> Curiously, they had a solution of sorts in a program where you could basically bid for your own ad buys to remove ads from pages. For some reason they shuttered this program down.

Because in reality this is just an opt in donation to Google. It's always cheaper to just block ads entirely.

Agreed.

Google makes about $3 per user per month in ad revenue[0]. With VAT and transfer costs that makes a equivalent subscription maybe $5 per month?

(Too much for my taste.)

Then you have to factor in that (far) fewer users are going to use/pay for their products if it's a subscription.

It's a though calculation for sure.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...

That’s what Kagi charges:

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual

For 300 searches a month.

Google is making it based on theoretically unlimited searches for everyone. No caps in the number of searches.

You have to to the $10 USD a month tier with Kagi to have the same expectation met, which is unlimited searches

This assumes that privacy-preserving advertising would make Google $0. I doubt this is the case, especially if every other company is also using a similar business model. For purely placement advertising, Google still has more reach than any newspaper or magazine ever produced in the pre-internet era.

How can someone possibly make a cost/benefit analysis when the future uses of public dna data are so speculative? Criminal in the 70s didn't think leaving their dna around could lead to their arrest 30 years down the line, probably didn't factor in their cost/benefit analysis at all. I guess maybe you could figure there's safety in numbers, if loads of people are in the same boat are you there's a ceiling on your risk (legislation eg). Those of us who grew up in the era of smoking a pack a day don't really feel that way.

But most people don't want Google to not exist. They derive significant value from it - from Google search, from Maps, from Gmail, whatever. I think that the access they have to my data has cost me basically zero, and I've gained a lot.

Had 23andme had access to my DNA, that might be worse in future. Although today there is not immediately a lot of downside, you can certainly imagine futures (maybe slightly dystopian ones) where that turns out to be pretty bad.

If your immediate family members or close blood relatives have done it, you're now identifiable in there.

And then people wonder why we can't have serial killers anymore.

*stupid serial killers

Eh, Google search has become so useless I caved in and started paying for Kagi. Maps is only barely more useful than competition. Gmail hasn't added anything new for a decade.

I haven't tried many alternatives to Maps. The last one I did was a built-in Tesla thing in a car that a family member had rented (he was keen on trying that out), and it was way worse. I'm sure there are other things that are better but honestly directions in Maps seem pretty good to me.

I don't think I even want anything new from Gmail. It's spent that decade (and most of the one before) holding all my email and serving it to me, that seems pretty good given I haven't had to pay them a cent for it.

I believe it’s more that people don’t see the potential threat and harm into providing sensible data to commercial entities.

People who have been for instance wrongly jailed because Google gave their location history to law enforcement and they happened to be near a crime scene, these people they understand the value of privacy.

People who were struck by lightning know not to go out of the house in rain. People who got hit by a falling brick on the sidewalk know to wear a hard hat when out and about.

These horror stories are so rare that the vast majority of people has never personally met anyone who personally knew anyone who had it happen. So it's all entirely theoretical and speculative for people who are busy and have social life goals. It's rightfully seen in similar light as the pepper hobby or extreme zero waste green philosophy. Worrying about it is basically a hobby, an identity, a community, an esthetic. Most people have some other hobby and identity and don't need this one.

It's not so much a hoby in countries where being gay for instance gets you into jail...

Or in countries where people criticizing the government policy disappear.

Yet it's a reality for Billions of people in Russia, china, India until not so long ago.

I mean, the world isn't just limited to the west where, at worst, you will get personalized advertisement and in very rare occasion something worst.

I replied specifically to the Google account thing. I don't think political dissidents need much convincing in these matters.

How wide do you think the spectrum is between political dissident and average Joe ?

How would for instance, Women in the USA having to remove period tracking app because they are afraid it could be used by the government against them, fit in your thought ?

It’s neither black or white, privacy nuthead or political activist. There is a wide spectrum.

I've never heard of that story (I'm also not American). If it's something that has impacted someone they know, they don't need convincing. I'm talking about the theoretical vague speculative stuff. People will care about privacy if it impacts real life events, not just some news piece about someone somewhere once, one customer from a hundred million but real people in their real lives. If that happens, then they care. If that does not happen, then they don't care about Amazon processing their voice recordings in the cloud or chat control scanning their DMs.

It's a lot less than 90%. Seems like they've exhausted the TAM and there's no one else to sell tests to.

But you have to acknowledge these companies started out as something different.

23andme started out as a democratized sequencing company

google started out as a search company. It became an identification and dossier-building company later.

or maybe I'm naive and they were data-grabs from the start.

Perceived cost and perceived risk. It's an important distinction.

Or, at least, the benefits are front-loaded and the costs—if you don’t write them off as theoretical—are future-you’s problem…

Made even more opaque by the way the DNA kit folks gave the impression of a straightforward, first-party transaction: you pay a not-insubstantial sum for us to do this service now, you get your report, done!

The cost is not static over time. As data storage, laws and AI evolve, the cost of having your data stored somewhere will increase significantly. So if you are making a cost evaluation based on the present situation you are incredibly naive.

Because they don’t know why they should take it so seriously. They really just don’t know why it’s bad that data about their DNA might be sold to the highest bidder.

> consumers are fine with sharing their data

Google is an advertising company. Google exists because businesses advertise and Google became, overnight in geological terms, the sine qua non of advertising.

Consumers aren’t really OK with sharing gobs of private data, but most don’t have a choice, many enjoy the free shit that they get from Google, most don’t notice or realize how much and what kind of data is collected, and none zero zip nada of us can stop Google from doing it.

This is absolutely nothing new in thousands of years. Businesses have sold and hoarded and collected and traded consumer info since time immemorial. Among themselves, with government, with law enforcement, with criminal gangs, who knows. You’re simply deluded if you think any commercial activity is private or confidential for a consumer. Yes even if you pay with $2 from your cleavage.

The other 10% being wanted criminals?

why more people don’t take their personal privacy seriously.

Probably because this testing has been happening for almost 20 years at this point, and we’re still waiting to hear about someone being harmed. For the most part, the privacy concerns are FUD.

I mean half of us have recklessly give out dna at one time or another.

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