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Comment by chmars | Hacker News Reader

'Sound paranoid? Consider the case of Google. (One of the founders of 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki, is presently married to Sergei Brin, the founder of Google.)'

That's where the article lost me …

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Sure, that was an awkward transition, but you gave up too early. One paragraph later justifies this:

"What the search engine is to Google, the Personal Genome Service is to 23andMe. The company is not exactly hiding its ambitions. “The long game here is not to make money selling kits, although the kits are essential to get the base level data,” Patrick Chung, a 23andMe board member, told FastCompany last month. “Once you have the data, [the company] does actually become the Google of personalized health care.”

Basically all we know in medical science, which we all benefit from, is based on health data collected from other indivivuals, often (and preferably) many individuals. Collecting data and using that to gain knowledge is not a bad thing per se.

If it was a institution where people expressly donated their data for research then that is the right way to do it. The concern is about selling that data and using it for other commercial purposes. Another concern is about creating this single repository of data that can then be exploited my incremental updates to TOS that nobody reads or understands.

The author is trying to use that relationship to stress a point which stands no matter whether the founder is related to Google founder or not. Take that piece of information out and the point that the author is making still stands. Google has showed us that by luring people to share their private information, it is possible to sell your users eventually. Now you don't have to be related to a Google founder to learn and use that business model. If there was any other company that followed the same practice and didn't explicitly allow me to own my data and delete it from their databases I'd be worried about that company as well. No matter whether they are related to Google or not. The relationship to Google just make me extra worried because of the history of Google.

The point has nothing to do with the relationship between the companies. Like the commenter upthread said, it was a clumsy way to transition into the topic. 23AM could be a Microsoft spin-off, or a Bloomberg company, or a Koch Brothers company: the same points would stand.

The reason Google matters is that it demonstrated that the business model of hoarding and capitalizing on personal information works. The rest of the article spells out ways in which 23AM is already capitalizing on its stored information.

>>> it demonstrated that the business model of hoarding and capitalizing on personal information works

Marketing companies and spammers are using this model all the time. AFAIK most of Google's income is from ads which use very little of personal information (yes, I know about targeted ads but I have a feeling marginal utility of those vs. just having ads on Google which everybody uses is not that high).

I really dislike the whole Google point - it just seems to be buying into the Google / privacy hysteria / phobia, and is a really extreme cynical viewpoint on these things. Yes, they want data (both Google and 23andMe). And yes they want to exploit it, and make money from that. But the reason they want to do that is because there is value there. Value to the companies, but the only reason it's valuable to them is because there is much, much greater to the downstream users that they will pass this information on to. I really dislike the exaggerated tone. For example:

> [Google makes money ] ... By parceling out that information to help advertisers target you, with or without your consent

Umm. No. 1) don't use Google services. Or 2) go to your account settings and disable personalised ads or 3) browse in incognito mode, etc. There are loads of ways to choose not to be targeted by ads. People seem to constantly feel a need to exaggerate what Google actually does. They don't "sell your data", they don't "track" you, they don't do anything "without your consent".

Not that I think Google needs any help defending themselves here - but what really concerns me is that we can very quickly slide into a kind of technophobia that will take a cynical viewpoint on every form of new technology. Anyone here involved in a startup can be a victim of that, and the level of acceptance by society of new technologies and change is really, really crucial to moving society forward.

> 1) don't use Google services

Is that really possible today? Have you tried to browse the web without trying to hit Google servers? Do you know how hard it is? No common man is capable of doing it frankly.

Not hitting their servers is different to not using their services.

You can block cookies to their domains, or just block all third party cookies, and then you will be pretty safe from them doing anything to track you. The browsers make this pretty easy - I would argue that is in reach of 'the common man', or at very least one who can use Bing (however Bing will profile and track you just like Google, of course).

What have you tried? Couldn't a browser extension just drop any requests for domains owned by Google? I think the problem you're trying to describe is that of their services being too good to give up.

We are living in the world of connections. You may have extremely low IQ and live off the streets, but if you know right/powerful people then you are very "rich" to other people.

Its one thing to be able to talk and convince Ellison, Gates, Musk, or Zuckerberg to invest in your company; its another thing to sleep with one.

You'd think Scientific American could manage to spell Sergey's name right.

In their defense, transliteration is weird. The spelling they used isn't one that Brin uses, but is one that is used for Сергей by other people.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5...

"A male given name, Sergey or Sergei."

Sure, I know people who spell it both ways, but in this case transliteration isn't an issue: you're talking about a public figure, the co-founder of Google, who's been in the US (and presumably spelling his name the same way) for 34 years.

This is just the case of a writer and/or editor being too lazy to look up the correct spelling.

Are you trying to ad-hominem the author? I don't understand the purpose of a comment like this, otherwise. Transliteration and spelling are distinct words and concepts. Frankly this is NBD to someone who is worth $NBdollars.

I am embarrassed to know to that they split sometime earlier this year.

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