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Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

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.”

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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).

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