This is unfortunate news for anyone whose data is now one of the assets to be sold to the highest bidder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reality is always so much more extreme than the conspiracies. Conspiracy theorists lack the minds to imagine half this stuff.
> 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.
But meet your new Big Brother!
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.
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.