23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself
reuters.com
reuters.com
- The CEO is effectively the control owner of the company, having 49% of the voting right. She has been trying to take the company private for some time.
- Last August, she proposed to buy all the outstanding shares at $8 per share. The board rejected. She installed a new board, and submitted her proposal again at $2.53 per share. The board rejected. She tried it a third time at $0.4 per share this month, and the board rejected.
- Meanwhile 23andMe was losing $50M every quarter.
So, unable to resolve the issue, the board choosed to enter into the bankruptcy process. I hope this relieves 23andMe from the corporate governance nightmare.
There are "scavengers" out there who buy a company if its assets are worth more than the market cap, close down the company or otherwise spin out the assets, and thus earn more than they paid for the shares.
Possibly true 20 or 30 years ago, but now shares are speculative assets, their worth determined by what the market thinks they might be bought for by a greater fool.
If the company has no chance at future profit, it becomes a simple share of assets. There are plenty of companies with assets only and no revenue or employees.
The share was trading at $8-$9 at the time.
The primary reason why the board has been rejecting the offer is that the CEO kept proposing discount prices to the market rate.
Edit, since I hit posting limit.
To pooper:
> Since it's such a big part of the S&P500
The conclusion is based on that premise, so any other business that satisfies that premise should also lead to the same conclusion.
To llm:
> I think their point is that businesses at the top of the S&P500 are traded at sentiment and momentum based values that are pretty disconnected from a logical P/E
I have read the same about other businesses many times. There is nothing logical about only using P/E as a factor in determining price (or “worth”). No one knows the future, so even a price derived from an arbitrary standard of P/E is a “sentiment and momentum based” value.
So index membership does change the stock multiple (but not by 10x).
Also, Tesla is an idiosyncratic stock with very high volatility and very high retail participation. Things can be true of Tedla stock which do not have to be true of the median stock.
Some stocks are overpriced, and others are undervalued. The inclusion in the S&P500 alone is just 1 of the factors.
In my opinion, Apple and NVIDIA are significantly undervalued based on their fundamentals, even though they make up a gigantic % of the SPX.
It could be logical to ascribe some value to a business’s leader having access to a US president known to be “open for business”? And we know a big tax bill is likely to be passed by year’s end.
Perhaps that will lead to good fortunes for Tesla shareholders. Or maybe not.
And the thing is, I don't have to be right about Tesla because I'm not making a single bet on that company. I'm making hundreds of bets using my methodology, and it's enough that I'm right 50-something% of the time (or even less than 50%, if we're talking Options trading).
That's what the whole stock market game is about. Hence, some investment companies, like Berkshire Hathaway, consistently make more than others over the long term.
(apologies for the below crude metaphor.. but...)
I am 1.80. You can kick me in the nuts and I will fold, but I will still be 1.80 a few minutes later.
Let's see after the kick in the nuts if the price will still be $8.
When there is blood in the water the sharks start circling. And some sharks 'short'. And I know little about their operations of 23andMe, but I understand the _value_ of their data!!!!! So they may be sitting on a pile of Latinum and not be able to fully monetize it (sell it to every pharma/insurance/etc.) company on the planet.
Also, corrections aren't instant, so if the change of value was for something that had already happened, not something currently happening, the offer will reflect the expected price that the shares would settle at.
In most high-profile bankruptcies, there aren't enough assets to even finish paying creditors, yet alone creditors. However, this is a voluntary Bankruptcy, so there might actually be assets left over to pay out to shareholders.
If the value of assets after paying off debtors is > $8/share, then that’s the easiest arbitrage opportunity considering it’s currently trading at $1.80.
Just buy the whole thing for $3/share (an irrefutable premium of 67%), shut down operations entirely, pay off the creditors, and pocket the net assets of > $8/share and more than double your money almost instantly.
If the claim is the CEO ran it into the ground then the board messed up even worse by not replacing the CEO.
So I’m doubting that is what is really happening here?
There isn’t one single value, value derived ( let alone perceived) is subjective
In this case, The stock is worth more(or less) to the 49% shareholder than others who are may value the founder holding defacto controlling stake negatively, thus discount the stock less than its book value .
This is also why sometimes same class of shares held by different people get priced (i.e. valued) differently in a single deal. Recently the paramount one is a good example .
Another famous example Yahoo was valued negatively for a long time before its sale to Verizon, I.e. its market cap was less than the value of its alibaba holdings .
One off events like county cases , drug trials likelyhood of a merger approval from regulators are hard to price accurately and can skew.
Can the board replace the CEO if the CEO has 49% of voting rights?
And those might include things preventing majority owner from buying everything at $0.01 per share.
I can only hope at the end of the day their data doesn't end up in the wrong hands. It is their most valuable asset, and this is a way bigger deal than it seems.
The ideal solution would be for all data to be deleted before a sale. If anyone would want to buy 23andMe without the collected data then that's perfectly fine.
If their DNA test can recognise first cousins, then they've got a recognisable DNA profile for each user's parents, grandparents, children and so on.
I doubt that specificity would be economically profitable.
The police did catch the Golden State Killer by scavenging a used coffee cup or somesuch, however.
The NIH occasionally updates this chart (note: Y axis is log scale)
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequen...
You can see there was a dramatic reduction in costs from 2008 to 2015, as several vendors released several substantial technology improvements, and a slow improvement from 2015 to now, but it's roughly flatlined, and there isn't much investment in developing new technologies now.
To the surprise of many, having enormous amounts of genomic data hasn't been the clear-cut improvement to human health, although there are some exceptions (especially cancer identification and personalized treatment). If we truly wanted to, we could spend capital and build out the sequencing, compute, and storage infrastructure to sequence every person on the planet at least once at 50X coverage, and store the data in perpetuity.
It's be much easiser to setup a DNA catfish from a Tinder date if someone is that determined to get a decent sample from you. If it's not targeted, a door-to-door salesman can collect dozens over a day for use.
There's so many social engineering tricks to take advanadge of that you'd paralyze yourself trying to keep your DNA to yourself. Better to just petition for regulation at that point.
And it required detectives to follow him around until he left whatever it was that was adequately isolated. It's a little different from a database of 7 million.
I think there are negative externalities if the data is sold to insurance firms — who can use the genomic information in litigation and policy rejections — or if the data is sold to some sort of powerful, pro-eugenics political organization. The insurance externalities likely can be mitigated with minimal legislation (protecting consumers in a similar manner to how we protect those with pre-existing conditions) and it is reasonable to assume pro-eugenics political groups wouldn’t be any less dangerous without this genomic data available.
Thus, I struggle to see how this data changing hands would be especially detrimental to society. One could contend a moral dilemma will arise from future developments in cloning, but would it? We already have clones in the form of identical twins, and their existence does not seem to create many, if any, especially problematic moral dilemmas. Maybe people are worried that society will start cloning celebrities and famous intellectuals instead of having babies more naturally — creating a world of designer babies where the diversity of thought and talent shrinks in a “tragedy of the commons”-esque dilemma — but I don’t think this is people’s issue because most people frame their qualms as more of a personal privacy issue. Moreover, designer babies issue I describe would likely become an issue with or without cloning.
There are issues that come to mind regarding genomics in commerce — such as the ethics and market incentives of patenting certain genomic patterns — but again I don’t see how this 23andMe data changing hands make this issue any more pressing than before.
On the other hand, my instinct (which I have learned to never blindly trust) is that making the data more widely available may make it cheaper and easier for researchers to make impactful discoveries. Therefore, my biggest worry with the change of ownership is that the new owners may keep the data behind a bigger wall.
Most peoples genomes are boring and at best sway the predisposition for disease by a modest degree. Exposing infidelity is honestly the best I can come up with.
How much of lifestyle do you think is determined by genetics, if any, and how much of that link do we currently understand?
I feel the concern around genetic data privacy has normally been the risk of unknown future stuff, rather than any current known vectors. I'm not saying it's a legitimate fear, but I don't know if it's one that is placated with "we can't currently do anything bad".
I do think over time we will get a clearer picture of risk predisposition based on your entire genetic profile. However, I believe that genetic predisposion will remain a relatively small contributor for most disease states.
I agree that genetic predisposition will remain a small contributor for most disease states. However, I (an idiot who has no authority or experience with anything relating to genetics) feel we're going to learn a lot about how our genetics indirectly influence our behaviour and decision making though.
I think it'll be a boring dystopia: the biggest problem will be that the more complex, distant relationships between genetics and life outcomes are discovered, the more opportunities the bodies responsible for health will have to say "well we have to protect ourselves from the uncertainty, and that's going to cost you/be profitable for us".
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
All the other types of insurance (life/disability/etc) are free to ask you to provide DNA if they think it would be useful for underwriting. The fact that they do not means the DNA is not providing enough signal to be worth considering in the underwriting process.
But if you were able to somehow combine the information with the medical history of people, then you could use the data for research, and come up with some DL model maybe.
I’ve done some of these saliva samples and I’ve seen the freak outs about what happens if “they” get my genome. But I cannot for the life of me figure out what they would do with it maliciously? It’s not like it can be used to sign up for a credit card or whatever.
So once the ‘’’bad guys’’’ purchase the 23andme database, the story is complete! They can then frame our protagonist…
im just afraid of the unknown. now its useless but how about after another 5/10 years?
When I first heard about them and similar services, the potential for abuse was the first thing that came to my mind. I am not paranoid in any way and those were easy times compared to now. Still, I prefer not knowing my ancestry than this.
And ancestry for Europeans is not such a hot topic, you just need to look at a bit of history of continent and its civilizations and get the idea.
(but I get your point and I agree)
Then we learn about the perils of "majority rules" setups, of lobbying, of trying to evaluate thousands of different decisions across hundreds or thousands of legislators, etc. and it becomes a lot less simple.
The outcome for this person is not great :-)
I don't think they would care much for scientific validity in this case. It won't matter to them if the methods used are reliable. All they'll get is appraisal from mainstream media for their revolutionary approach, further ingraining social darwinism.
the method of being a fortune-teller? I don't see how that would ever be reliable unless we figure out voodoo kinds of tricks attacking the nervous system.
In the case of PRS assessment where it's already an established discipline, and not at all as unreliable as fortune-telling, it wouldn't be so hard to weaponize it.
But there's a difference between forming a cult and trying to convince the minds en masse of something.
And ok, let's agree for the sake of it that it is like astrology. Astrology is unnervingly popular, there are columns of big newspapers HN reveres dedicated to zodiac signs.
A cult consisted of people buying into something very close to eugenics masked as science doesn't sound it would have trouble gaining mainstream appeal in today's American society.
In fact, there's a great example of such discipline having already gained significant traction, even on this website, and it is none other than the field of evolutionary psychology. This field has provided close to zero replicable hypotheses yet it has been successfully weaponized into justifying prejudice and antisocial behavior, especially in the context of racial differences and dating.
Something like advertising reliable prediction of behaviors based on DNA would be cherry on top.
You mean like the art of advertisement, or more like what the extant system of social conditioning does in general?
How about scam emails that open by asking people about their family history of some disease with a genetic marker and promising some miracle treatment?
I can think of even worse outcomes depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts
>depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts
Birthright citizenship invalidates such profling, but even then: I don't think the government needs DNA to figure out identities of people in the database.
> It's not really a business that cares about targeted approaches.
> Birthright citizenship invalidates such profling
Even on a firesale, I doubt it would be cheap enough for the margins they work on. These aren't exactly large scale, sophsticated operations being worked with here.
>Only if you think that matters and the SCOTUS will uphold it.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think they will. If only because it's an absolute nightmare logistically trying to do it any other way. No country is going to accept a deportation flight of peopel who were not born on their land.
Or perhaps we have an underpopulation crisis decades later which does incentivize that. But that would solve the deportation issue in and of itself, right?
How about generic profiling by a future malicious government that only wants certain types of genomes to proceed to the next generation?
If you have a baby at home with a lay midwife, the health departments retain will hound you endlessly to get this done, although legally you can choose to decline as a parent. Barely anyone does, since most parents want to know if their newborn will have a serious genetic disorder that can be easily avoided by (for example) avoiding artificial sweeteners.
What's different today that would create a massive outcry that there wasn't 4 years ago?
You do that kind of stuff across enough axis and the people who ought to be leaving your supporters dangling from the overpass will be too marginalized and preoccupied to do much of anything.
You don't even need "high tech" to do this sort of stuff. Depostic regimes have been doing it for centuries.
Even I think I'm nowhere near unethical enough to maliciously use this dataset, but who would have thought that a social media platform where you scroll posts from your friends and family could be used as a political tool?
This is a trait of delusional people as well as those very deep into some "technocratic" ivory tower without any formed code of ethics, too.
For example, we now have cell-penetrating prime editor ribonucleoproteins, a derivation of the CRISPR system. These are essentially assembled molecular machines that can be loaded install almost any genetic mutation, such as tumor driver mutations. A picogram of this protein complex is potentially enough to riddle your body with cancer a couple of years after delivery.
But that still seems like a minute possibility.
I mean ancestry.com data van be used similarly, but genetical info is inobfuscable.
I wonder if some of those freaking out about the issue have a reason to be concerned.
On the other hand, once the information is out there, any aggrieved party will have plausible access to it, so it could be argued any statute of limitations would kick in.
Why would a company being sold mean that the data can be used for a purpose it previously couldn't?
I'm concerned with being put on a list of ashkenazi, and sold to people who work for my death on that basis.
https://www.wired.com/story/23andme-credential-stuffing-data...
2. There is incest in your family. Pay to find out.
3. We have found 4 significant markers of X diseases. Pay to find out. (Against FDA in claims of illness)
4. A lost family member was found in $location. Do you want to identify them and send money? (Likely faked, scam)
5. Surrogate or adopted: we know your birth parents. Pay to find out.
There's just a few unethical and/or illegal business opportunities for malicious actors. And that was just 5 off the top of my head.
If you wanted to be really evil, you combine it with other hacked/leaked/ransomed data sources and turn the screws.
If insurance companies use this information to inform coverage decisions, then it's a moot point right? Just because you and I (who am also in this field) understand the limitations of the models and the data, does not mean that powerful entities will not use it to do stupid things.
I reached out to a guy on 23andMe that was a DNA relative (2nd cousin) and said hi. Curious how we were related, I gave him some family names going several generations back, and asked if any of them rang a bell in his family history.
He responded quickly and said no, they did not.
Then a few weeks later I get another response. He said that one of the names had faintly rung a bell, and when he dug into it, it turned out that was the name of his mother's boss for much of her career as a secretary. His heart sank when he realized it. He and his siblings did genetic tests and confirmed that he, the youngest, was only a half-sibling. Both of the parents were deceased so there's no way to know what really happened.
After dropping that bomb in the poor guy's lap I stopped using the DNA Relatives feature.
Narrator: it ended up in the wrong hands
This should've been a giveaway that the company was imminently going to go under.
Elon: "Comedy!"
> The California-based company has publicly reported that it is in financial distress and stated in securities filings that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.
Maybe it was a bad idea. But, I figured if we enter a dystopian future, evil health care companies or governments could easily get my DNA if they want to and/or simply require that information to get care. When you get blood drawn, do you see what they do with it?
Hopefully, what matters is the laws we all fight for and not whether I sent my spit to an internet company in 2022.
Anyways, will delete my data.
what this thread is about is denying a kid a kindergarten spot because the dna shows their height will never get them a basketball college scholarship.
And people are made to care about things that don't actually make any sense all the time, you just gotta set up the incentives just right.
Although in the future I imagine it's more likely to be things like arm to torso ratio or gait recognition or similar, done via machine vision.
Biometric comparison is commonplace, once you give your biometric info
What I'm saying is that people would be id'd by a biometric measure derived from a genetic measure
(and yes of course I watched Gattaca already)
Yes, because you gave it to them. Nihilism undermines any sort of resistance movement against evil.
That doesn't mean we can do nothing, but it means withholding information won't matter as much as some people think.
It's not really something the mass population can physically prevent from a determined actor. Like data, you need to regulate it instead of take excessive preventative measures.
Another is to have all info and weaknesses automatically available to 'the man' or more 'the men', no need to make things too easy for them and jump ahead in queue.
Yes. I'm lazy, and at thaat level of compromised data: it is much easier to disincentivize theft than to worry about theft at every corner. You need to change your approach away from the immediate instincts.
>Another is to have all info and weaknesses automatically available to 'the man' or more 'the men'
They already have it. Fortuately, we made laws disincentivizing them using that stuff without big reprecussions.
Sure they can. The government obviously can. Otherwise they just buy data from the decade of tracking data left behind. That's the relatively easier part in comparison to targeted DNA gathering.
Hilarious, I love it.
Next you're gonna say they told you that you'll probably die of something that you can forestall a bit with good diet and exercise.
All I wanted to know, since my grandpa died of Parkinson's.
A clinic usually asks you to sign a form that says you are responsible for paying whatever they and an unaffiliated laboratory end up saying you owe. Minimum being $250, and maximum being unknown.
The question, of course, is whether that same functionality is applied to residents of other states wishing to delete their data…
The problem is that it infected the mindset of almost every company. Those that worked at companies who needed it brought the mindset everywhere. And like many technologies, people who study what big companies do mimic it everywhere, even where it's not needed.
So your simple stupid SaaS company has some simple object that a user wants to delete that ends up living in a db somewhere... forever.
This seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It offers a safety net, while still getting the job done.
With as many data breaches as we see these days, I want my data gone. If someone gets a dump of the DB, a delete flag doesn’t matter.
This was the primary reason I never got a DNA test, even though I want to see what my results would be. I never trusted the companies to store that data long term. If I could get a test where a company didn’t store the results after they were provided to me, I’d get one tomorrow.
One hard delete can expose months worth of bugs.
Exaggerating here, but I do think soft deletion practices can be partially blamed on real business problems. I'm not sure why anyone would think that using soft deletion on an actual burn account function would be sensible though.
If you have data for a user, who wants to delete it, you can soft delete to allow recovery to prevent complaints.
On the other hand, 5 years from now your system gets hacked, and now you have to email some person you haven't done business with in 5 years to tell them their data that you claimed was deleted was leaked.
Sure you can do soft deletions with some hacky actual delete schedule but it doesn't really solve the problem, only reduces the timeline.
Discord (and many other places) allow you to recover your account within a specific period of time, but they do not delete anything, you just simply lose access and your name gets changed (and avatar and status removed), but all your DMs are there, all your messages are there (although I understand why, especially in servers (guilds)).
There is a way to bulk save and delete messages from Discord, however.
That's on you though - shouldn't have sent spam pretending to be transactional email.
Internet is not what we used to have years ago, currently the majority of users are not tech literate and that creates new problems now.
I'm not talking about unsolicited email, but legitimate transactional email related to the account that only triggers off a user action.
- you have legal obligations no matter what the customer wants, eg, Amazon and storing transactions for tax reasons
- you do actively delete most of their data, eg profiles, but “deleted=true” on their central account record is needed to propagate the deletion to other systems, eg, customer analytics
- you tombstone it for efficiency reasons and only periodically delete the records as part of your checkpoint/backup procedure; similarly CDN deployments
- you delete all the live copies, but tell customers “retained up to 90 days” because you need backups to age out
I’m not saying companies are all innocent — but there are some legitimate reasons that deletions aren’t fully instant.
When the data has value to the company and it is legal to keep it it seems very sensible to keep it (out of the perspective of s.o. acting in the interest of the company).
I'm not at all saying that soft deletion shouldn't exist. I'm arguing that hard deletion should be the default, and then soft deletion practices should have some justification.
Instead the industry chose to just soft delete everywhere, which is good for the industry, and bad for users.
It should just be followed up by hard delete several days or weeks later. The general policy should never be to hold things indefinitely.
As a practical example I have soft deletion for more or less everything on my desktop. There are periodic filesystem level snapshots and those stick around until I manually GC them. It has saved me more than once.
Deleting something you should not have: potentially a business extinction event. And a fine as well.
Big companies do this but it requires some technical maturity. If you operate in Europe you have to implement proper data deletion. I would be more worried about small companies that large ones tombe honest.
You've also added (possibly substantial) latency to every single operation that operates on user data.
Yes you would need to carefully design the system that allows deletion of keys while minimizing chances of data loss, but it can be done, and it's going to be cheaper and less complex to do so on a tiny subset of the data.
Latency considerations are also down to design, it's not a given that there will be significant overhead imposed.
Who knows who will buy all this data after bankruptcy...
Does anyone at 23andMe know if when DNA data and account is deleted by them that it is really deleted/purged from all backups and systems? Anonymous accounts are available, thanks!
Once cheap enough, be sure DNA analysis is used for better ad-targeting at scale, just as users' web traffic is analysed.
All is done once economically feasible and grey-legal enough.
Not that it keeps me up at night, but it’s fascinating to me that if we ever get to the point where a machine is in a position to care about your DNA, it probably will have enough resources to not need to rank anyone by importance.
People who think having millions of people dna is worth something. I could think of company working with private investigators or even governments.
Your dna sample is part of 23andMe valuation right now, I wouldn’t have hope even if it says your data is removed on their website, there are still backup.
The very idea that it's possible to delete all your data from any service not running everything on tmpfs is funny to me.
I work at a bank, one of major ones. We have various regulations stating to keep client records for 5 years. We have trainings that specifically say that we shouldn't keep client records longer than 5 years (additional costs, generally just a risk without any reward).
Guess what - main core banking system's DB holding all client data and transactions is ever-growing, no data were ever purged from it in past 30 years. Nor will it ever happen in future. Too complex, nobody owns removal process, nobody rally cares about those data.
This is situation with 0 good reasons to keep data. 23 has massive valuation reasons to keep them. Its not what it can be used for now but the vast unknown potential in future, of data that are inheritable and thus useful for hundreds/thousands of years. Don't hold your/parent's breath, be reasonable in current climate.
Also i "permanently" deleted a facebook account 2 years ago, and through a quirk on a cellphone facebook immediately brought the account back like it had never been deleted. I issued another "permanent delete" for that account a week ago, but i bet dollars to doughnuts in 5 weeks i will still be able to "oops i forgot my password, send me an SMS" will reactivate the account again.
If facebook can't or won't do it, i don't really think anyone handles this correctly.
Except people like me that store everything that users upload in tmpfs, and whenever i feel like it, i bounce the box. Good luck recovering any PII from that system. Unfortunately it doesn't have access control (there is no access to the system - that is, ssh, login, shell, whatever - from outside.), so i can't claim hipaa compliance. That and it doesn't log, so after a bounce i can't even verify who did what.
Most users won't stand for this kind of thing, but the users that can, depend on my random reboots if they forget a delete key (usually reloading the tab will "forget" the delete key.)
Congress hasn't really been functional in decades
Few, intentionally: a strategic decision has been made to use control of Congress as a shield for executive dictatorship, rather than using it to pass laws, with the attendant public debate and recorded votes.
> What happens to my data if the company is sold or otherwise changes ownership?
> If the company does change ownership in the future, your data will remain protected under the current 23andMe Privacy Policy unless and until you are presented with materially new terms, with appropriate advanced notice to review those material changes as required by law.
https://x.com/iskander/status/1903077361152610374 -- about a dozen of us with math/CS backgrounds ditched tech for biomedicine. And we got humbled hard: most of what we did flopped & techies
No surprise given that biotechnology has a lot more stakeholders. Ethics aren't just an afterthought because unlike VC/the stock market, academia has lots of ethics review gates in place. And for those that think they can sidestep ethics by going private (be it Theranos, 23andMe or various other such services), they'll all find out one day that it will catch up to them.
to work with life is to work in factors that directly affect others, Unless you're doing something like pure biology where you simply observe. Even then, the art of observing sentient beings has its hundreds of quirks.
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
However, that's 2 big if's: Are they still operating normally, and do they consider "your data" data you upload or genetic data pertaining to you.
You can requires all your data to be deleted and tastiest none is added.
This deletes the "family tree" to be seen by everyone
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-23andme-going-under-...
Seems like they struggled to turn a one-off purchase model into recurring revenue. At some point everyone in the world who cares enough about their DNA has already bought your product.
The "regulatory obligations" sounds like a fake excuse. Is 23andme even regulated beyond how your regular average business might be?
They have to retain data about the person who requested the deletion which seems eminently reasonable. In the future if you sue them because you can't access your account that you paid for, they have a record that you requested said account's deletion.
Similarly they obviously can't withdraw your data from the anonymized research projects they pursued.
I nearly cut contact with my mother over he wanting to use 23andme for genealogy purposes. The threat was ugly but as far as I know got her to not do it.
There are a lot of people who have now made major choices for others personal data who had little meaningful informed consent. Now it’s up for the highest bidder. I have some small hope the EFF will say something on behalf of consumers and a court will listen. I it pure hopium but it’s all I’ve got.
source: I'm already toast
I thought companies in bankruptcy will be broken apart and its assets sold piecemeal. Can anyone who buy this out of auction get in one piece and debt-free?
Most of the times when you see the news reporting about prominent/public US companies filing for bankruptcy, it’s chapter 11. Which is also the case here with 23andme
In chapter 7, there is no rehabilitation, the whole company is handed over to a trustee, who is in charge of selling the assets (or abandoning them), and paying back the stakeholders
In other countries this may be referred to as voluntary administration, though the exact details of what it all means varies from country to country and I'm not a bankruptcy lawyer.
However, the article highlighted that one of the co-founders was the wife of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, and the company's association with (and investment of) Google provided a sense of data security and stability. .... now it might be sold for (data) parts to whoever.
Let’s see if anything worthwhile comes of it. Feel free to ask me for more. I have the raw reads as well. Email in profile.
I imagine if you try to delete your data now it’s conveniently too late/no staff around.
Possible Pros: You find out you are 20% Norwegian! Fun!
Possible Cons: Grandma is going to prison for an unsolved crime. Assume a non-threatening position and comply with all orders of the new Department of Racial Purity. Also, that's not your real Dad.
The murder one is a little more nuanced but ideally it should be a legal matter where it can only be used with a warrant or your explicit single time consent and not buried in a TOS. If you don't want to help the police convict your grandma it could not legally be used.
What 23andMe did was try and build a startup around this with the intention of monetising that data in other ways later. That’s why it was so cheap that people gave them away for Xmas. Had this just been a private data base of people and connections, it would have cost many times more to get the test.
Nothing has gone wrong, except for those who handed over DNA.
Your DNA is not something that you can 100% keep from others.
Reality is always so much more extreme than the conspiracies. Conspiracy theorists lack the minds to imagine half this stuff.
As for government collecting samples from the environment, they (researchers funded by the government) already do that- it was used in COVID and many other places.
The minion is really quite limited- it's a convenient tool to have in the field, but nearly everybody who is doing serious sequencing is using larger, more expensive desktop machines in a lab.
Danish police had to reopen over 12,000 cases where DNA evidence was used and redo everything because neither the police nor the judges understood that the tests used an insufficient numbers of DNA markers to uniquely identify a person. Most of the incorrectly identified people was exactly innocent, but people went to jail over drug charges that should have been a warning or a fine.
> Also, that's not your real Dad
Yeah, that part was less fun
Like, it’s so common that I’m not even shocked to hear others with this experience.
As it turns out, there were a lot of sketchy clinics preying upon desperate parents in the early 1980s.
No one was expecting that once she had the data she'd divorce him and go full Marissa Mayer.
I remember her and I both spitting into a tube in our SF apartment in San Francisco in 2012 and mailing them off.
A few years later, we look at the ancestry data and there is a big surprise (she was ~50% something that she was sure 0% before that).
Turns out her dad wasn’t her dad and she was donor conceived — this has potentially huge health implications if you don’t know this.
By some fortunate circumstance, she ultimately found the donor… and 27 (and counting) siblings! Turns out the clinic where this all went down at in the early 1980s was sketchy and lied to a whole bunch of people and misused samples.
I don't think so. They probably automatically determine how closely related all their customers are, so it just takes one of your (possibly distant) relatives putting in enough family tree.
It's kind of irritating the way you are minimizing the "pros" here (and you aren't the only one at HN who has done this recently). There are people who found their parents and siblings thanks to 23 and Me. I found my father and my half sister. Maybe it's not important to you, but there are people out there who are willing to "pay" a lot to find out who they are. I appreciate that to you it may not feel like a good trade, but please have the empathy to understand that for others, it is.
You are who you are, based on the genetics you got from all of them, and importantly, all the nurture you've received and learning you've done since that moment.
Reconnecting with lost siblings is a legitimate thing one can want and which can bring closure, etc etc but definitely doesn't have anything to do with who you are.
Fuck me right?
Only you can decide if it's worth it. I hope it was for you.
Ironically no, because all I got out of it at best was at best your list of pros. I already knew I was likely a european mongrel because i'm white as snow, so largely useless sadly.
But meet your new Big Brother!
A normal "small business" doing this could run with 3 software gals, 2 genetics guys, and a CEO that handles finances and management responsibilities. A "small lifestyle business" like that could make an okay profit for all involved.
A startup, however, took $XXMM in VC funding, which included strong encouragement that "you have to hire this many people, we want at least 10x growth".
Once you hire a team of 30 people to manage your servers and a team of 180 software engineers to write your webpage, it's super hard to scale back down to a scrappy 3-5 person software team.
Wonder what happens to the treasure trove of data they have collected though. Hopefully the data is just 'sudo rm -rf —-no-preserve-root' and not included as part of bankruptcy proceedings.
How do I explain that I don't want my DNA analysed and sold around to all sorts of companies?
10-15 years ago she wouldn't have predicted trump, what can't she predict about 10-15 years or more from now?
[0]: data can't be erased but can be leaked.
Honestly you can't. I've come to realise that unless someone personally is hurt from the lose of private information, then there's no way to convince to the risks.
People either comes down on the side of privacy and caution, or they completely fail to see if issue and believe that the risks are vastly overblown. Very rarely do you see anyone go from the latter to the first, unless they suffer personally.
I'm certain i read about it from HN but i can't find any reference to that new anymore.
it's not just for you, but for anyone related to you - this database is hugely dangerous thing to have exist, and always has been, but at least notionally was a semi-serious medical business, but is now going to be sold for scrap in an extremely poisonous environment in the US.
Even if you have never used 23andMe several people you are related to already have so they have a partial genetic profile of you.
Are we back to feudalism?
People who do the right thing are usually satisfied by the time they hit only 50 million.
I suppose that I'm fortunate to live in an area covered by GDPR and fairly strong medical data regulations.
That's what we would do if we were billionaires.
And that's precisely why we're not billionaires.
I'm happy with my choices, though. They're merely confident and callous, but happiness will ever elude them.