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Comment by cheeseomlit | Hacker News Reader

Based on my conversations with friends who paid for 23andMe they probably wouldn't have cared, and likely still don't. 23andMe customers are the kind of people who put Alexas in their bedroom

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From Day 1, it was Google in the shadows of the company (due to the connection with Wojcicki), so it's obvious that a Google-connected company would try to monetize the data.

Now that being said, when it was launched, 23andme was the only way to have very affordable and high-quality and reliable DNA scans.

This data is very useful to improve your quality of life today using tools like Promethease. This to be weighted, against a risk that "potentially" someone may use maliciously in X or XX years.

There is also the "risk" that they use this data to develop popular medicines that will actually help your long-term quality of life (if you can afford it).

The big "risk" that I see is that this would bring into existence the world of GATTACA, where everyone's genetic information is open, and you might be, e.g. denied a job because they assessed that people with genes similar to yours are likely to do bad in such a role.

any examples of quality of life improvements?

I don't buy any QoL improvements, but genealogy is a use case. For some of us, it is really meaningful and valuable to know who we're related to and how.

Privacy advocates, by-and-large, don't engage with the fact that people are often willing to trade their data for value. Surely some people are under-informed and wouldn't if they fully understood the tradeoffs but there are some people who are fully informed and willing to make that tradeoff. The informed-tradeoff-makers opinions' matter exactly as much as the under-informed group's does.

I think if one estimates what percentage of people are uninformed vs what percentage of people are informed, the likely outcome is that the informed people are being heavily subsidised by the uninformed people (and being so well informed, are well aware of this fact, and thus actively work to encourage the status quo)

Or even worse than putting a potentially compromised microphone in their bedroom, carry around a microphone in their pocket all day which is also definitely reporting its location to call companies.

Is 23andMe no longer going to provide matrilineal mitochondrial DNA analysis and haplogroups?

It is a very valuable service if you’re Jewish, that others like Heritage.com don’t. Where can you get it otherwise?

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