• phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Doesn’t help that they immediately updated their user agreement to avoid responsibility. Nothing says give our product a chance like that.

    • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today
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      9 months ago

      Honestly, even with really shitty notoreity and legal troubles, stock prices don’t reach pennies without gross mismanagement of shares and offers.

      Or have they just been unprofitable every quarter for years?

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Well someone’s not getting reborn 200M years from now in Cenozoic Park.

      Dun dun! Dun duuun! Dun-da daaa da-dun dun daaaah! flails silly human arms RAAAH!!!

      • Eheran@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Except that leaving it somewhere is like a pseudonym. It would take a lot of effort to pinpoint to once specific person unless that person was already the sole target - then you just get a sample at their home.

        Also, breathing out DNA?

        • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It’s not necessary for the person to be the sole target.

          By comparing the persons DNA to 2 or 3 relatives in a database, it’s quite easy to identify whose DNA you have, or at least narrow it down to a few potentials. (E.g. the DNA is from a male that is a cousin of X by the male line and nephew of Y by the female line).

        • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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          9 months ago

          all dna is interconnected as all humans are sourced from the same source dna. at some point, we will have enough dna in a database to be able to pinpoint almost any sample to anyone or their family closest in that dataset. it will eventually just be everyone. the set doesnt change, it will just grow as more people are added and its ‘accidentally’ released. its inevitable.

          retrieving any humans dna you really want is fairly trivial. we need only minute traces anymore, and it gets less as amplification techniques improve. they already have molecular sniffing devices in all major airports. not for dna, but you get the idea.

          ha, yes when you breathe you exhale a lot of particulate into the air, and guess what, its laden with your dna.

          personally, i could not care less. have my dna, do what you will with it. oh noooes you have all of the numbers of me… whateverwillido?!

          realistically, its only valuable in aggregate.

          the only real concern ive ever heard was corporations making decisions on peoples dna, and that can be trivially circumvented by extending discrimination laws.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Well first off it isn’t just you. It is your family as well. Maybe your cousin is more privacy minded and doesn’t appreciate it. Did you get their consent before you spit?

            Secondly if you can’t think of how this could be misused you have a failure of imagination. We already know that a list of people with Jewish background leaked and it is an open question what happens next with that, but I highly doubt anything good. Maybe other minorities will be targeted next? Roma for example or the autistic. It doesn’t even have to be nightmarish like terrorism and tailored germs it could be boring oppression.

            • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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              9 months ago

              i get your fear, really, i do. ive never said it couldnt be abused. im saying dna is not private. its the worlds longest username.

              it is a finite dataset. it will be inevitably be mapped across the entire planet, and guess what, it will be public.

              you want to approach the Use of this data, go crazy. that is an important task.

              i am personally not going to go around pretending my code is special or valuable or not publicly available.

              you can do you, but at some point regardless of any activity on your part, you will be on the graph.

              • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Right so just because something might happen eventually doesn’t absolve anyone of what we do today.

                It is already understood that you don’t really have a right to privacy decades after your death. If someone wants to map out my DNA and sell it they can when I am dead and my kids are dead and my grandkids are dead with my blessing.

                • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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                  9 months ago

                  ha no, this is happening today. we are catching criminals today that are tangentially related to dna samples in databases all over the place. its not going to be multiple decades after death. the more data added. the easier it is today to be able triangulate people already related to you. because at the heart of the matter, we are all related.

                  the resolution will only get better in the next few years as we start slapping LLMs on it.

                  your dna has no value.

                  dna databases have value.

                  i agree, no need to wait on extending anti-discrimination laws. lets do it yesterday.

                  but again, my dna is not private, today.

    • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      No, they’ve been heading south for years. I would have loved for it to be a drop in response to the data breach, but this was just a company that was run incompetently.

    • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      Which data were they negligent with? I thought it was breaches on other sites that gave reused passwords.

      • Hegar@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        Credential stuffing is a well understood part of the threat landscape that 23 and me negligently failed to account for, allowing hackers to access 7 million people’s info after hacking only 14 thousand users.

        • jimbo@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          …because those 7 million people opted into sharing their data with everyone else.

          • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            No, they opted to share varying degrees of information with authorized users and close genetic matches, and 23andMe failed to protect them from a large scale takeover of accounts that made public the kind of information the company had promised to keep private to semi-private.

            14,000 accounts compromise by the same entity. That’s absolutely the fault of the platform, not the users.

            • jimbo@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              You’re making a distinction without a difference. Nobody has any fucking clue who their “genetic match” will be nor does anyone have any fucking clue who else is using 23andMe. Sharing that information with other 23andMe users is not meaningfully different than just sharing it with the world at large.

          • Hegar@kbin.social
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            9 months ago

            It’s not the responsibility of your grandma who’s researching family history to be aware of potential data security threats. It’s the responsibility of the multimillion dollar online company with massive, valuable data troves to not offer a feature that was just a data breach waiting to happen.

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              I remember when the housing market crashed and hearing all these rich folks talk about how it is poor people who are responsible for not knowing they couldnt afford their homes.

              Yeah so why exactly do we have a credit rating system if it isn’t rating credit?

              You are completely correct. It is not on regular people to be experts on cyber security and somehow know that the company is doing their job and will do their job forever.

      • tiredofsametab@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        There are still all kinds of things a company can do to mitigate at least some of this. New browser, new location, forced two-factor auth, etc.

        • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Cmon, we know their target market was dumbasses. How many dumbasses do you know that use mfa, or that actually look at a login notification before hitting “yes, it’s me”?

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      That’s pretty much been their business model from day 1. If they didn’t plan to sell it, there was no reason for them to keep it.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yeah it was always going to come down to this. You can’t make a lot of money on a business model that involves a selling something only once per customer. Eventually they were going to have to either charge money for data storage or sell what they had.

        • zik@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          There was no “eventually”. The whole point of their business was to sell it. They’ve been selling it since day one.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      9 months ago

      Exactly why I never even considered dealing with those DNA companies. They’re a privacy nightmare.

  • Z4rK@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    It will be interesting to see what the company that buys all their data will do with it.