Considering the long list of awful pharma, insurance, and marketing firms in the world out there, Regeneron is probably one of the better outcomes
Everybody made fun of Elon buying twitter but the spin-off from it (X.ai) was valued enough to buy the original company.
We'll need to wait a bunch of more years to see if the 23andme concerns were unfounded.
Crucial X.ai bought out X with a minority of stock. X.ai as in the thing spun out from X to do ai using X's data. Fidelity seems to value X.ai enough to be happy to have gotten more shares of it using the X shares.
I swear if OpenAI happened like 1 year prior to the twitter sale then everybody would have a different opinion about 44 Billion being the correct price for twitter.
Genetic information is valuable for finding drug targets, but it's generally a poor predictor of disease, except in case of rare monogenic disorders. With the advent of large population studies such as UK Biobank, which include lots of epigenetic information as well, I am not sure if one can get much extra value from 23andme's dataset in a pharmaceutical context.
Does it though? This is just a temporary stop gap, the data will continue to move and be exchanged, and this company will eventually collapse or be bought out as well.
This has played out in real time since the advent of stable diffusion and LLM ai - the data available on the internet was originally thought to be unmonetizable. Most people putting that data online simply thinks nothing of it, and let it be freely viewed.
Now, all of a sudden, these same people start complaining that their data are being used to train an ai (from which they obviously claim they want a piece of the profit off).
I expect genetics data to follow the same trajectory (and we just dont have any use for said data right now).
Dismissing valid concerns about such data being sold and traded around as "fearmongering" also seems unfair. Given the
Life, uh, really does find a way!
People who got bamboozled into paying for this junk service shouldn’t have their DNA data treated as some commodity that can be traded like a stock.
The sale of this data should be treated as PII and "transfers of ownership" should not be implied. The default for every user should be to delete the data upon sale of company and provide a way for users to opt in to the transfer.
Users should be incentivized and trust (if any at this point) needs to be rebuilt with this new company, not implied.
Grandpa sewed some oats before he got with your grandma? That's his business, not his relatives'.
It's hard to argue that a criminal's rights are being violated if he's found out through a DNA database, but the privacy ramifications overall of them are really unfortunate. The world is moving to a place where your biometrics are on the record, and the government can use them to hunt you down (see also, Global Entry, fingerprinting people who work with kids, Real ID, speed cameras, etc.).
I really don't like that we're being surveilled by default now. It's even creepier when there's now an administration in power that has no respect for prior norms and a long list of perceived enemies.
I remember watching GATTACA and thinking how depressing it was in 1997. Its been less than 30 years and we're already here.
I like that you have to be Live Scanned to be an EMT or work with children. You aren't forced to do those jobs and they do require a higher level of trust. The FBI opened its fingerprint database a century ago now, and it's been used for a lot of good and I'm sure some bad. But more good?
That means the only insurer who could afford the risk is the US government.
This is a feature not a bug.
Completely agree. The usual social media esque "it's a free service so you are the product" arguments don't apply here, people paid 23andme for genetic testing.
The good news is:
>"Regeneron pledged to comply with 23andMe’s privacy policy, which allows customers to have their personal information deleted upon request."
There needs to me a massive campaign to convince every single customer to file a data deletion request.
This is important: don't assume that because you're paying for a service that your personal data isn't still being mined. It doesn't matter if you fairly, over or under pay for a service. There's nothing illegal or uncommon about that.