If 23 and Me goes bankrupt, they will sell all of the biometric data they’ve collected over decades to the highest bidder. Why can’t the US government step in to purchase the company and establish a public trust?
Why would the government care? Lol they don’t care about a genocide or crippling medical care costs why would they decide to have a moral compass now?
Honestly, the law enforcement implications of the government buying the database is just as scary as a 3rd party. Hell I bet a company buys the data and sells access to the FBI, and local law enforcement for a subscription fee.
Agree 100%
How accurate is that data? I have a relative who received different results from their family tree than expected. So they sent it in again. Different results. Annoyed, they sent on yet another test. Again, different results. Not slight either, entire additions and subtractions.
They are rife with differences. They have improved over time, but they generally don’t really identify specific ancestry. Rather, they use statistical patterns to correlate self-reported ancestry.
Why should they?
Anyone who used 23 and Me agreed that their genetic code was able to be used my 23 and Me for whatever they want. Why is it now the job of the government to jump in and give those people retroactive protection.
Because those people never agreed to it being used by anyone else. And it’s in the public interest to protect everyone from their highly-sensitive biometric data being misused.
Having ownership of something also implicitly gives you the right to sell that thing. Unless 23andMe explicitly stated in the contract that they were under obligated to never share that information. I highly doubt the had anything like that in the contract because, well, here we are.
Also, 23andMe afaik is not a medical association, so they likely aren’t bound by things like HIPPA (idk if specific genetic encodings would be included in that anyways) to protect information.
That’s speculation, not fact, and I also don’t agree that owning a thing necessarily means you can sell it in an unrestricted/unregulated manner (guns, tobacco, as well as other sensitive medical info can’t just be sold willy-nilly)— especially when the “it” is sensitive biometric data whose originators never agreed to share it. That’s the problem when you and the greedy corporations you’re defending assume implicit consent rather than to ask for it: it’s damaging to the public and invades these people’s medical privacy in the name of profit.
And whether 23andMe should be subject to HIPAA laws is debatable at best.
They DID agree to share it.
Should that have been an option? Probably not, but now you are talking about legislation with wider implications, not some half baked public trust to protect a small group of people.
There are other databases of genetic code out there you know. The FBI can potentially accuse you of a crime based on your cousin uploading info to a genealogy website.
They DID agree to share it
I saw in another comment.
That doesn’t negate the public interest in protecting such data, as I have said.
Besides, that clause may not hold up in court.
All the more reason for broader legislation than a half baked idea about buying just this one database.
They did agree to share it but their children didn’t and a database this large is likely to have significant predictive effects on generations to come.
the people we should be concerned about getting their hands on this data are not like, goateed hackers. they’re banks, insurance companies, recruiters. those are some pretty powerful lobbies
The government is one of the entities that pays these companies for data. They’re no more trustworthy than a private corporation.
As a practical matter, this is less concerning to me than data breaches like the Equifax one where my social security number and everything else were compromised. I can think of ways 23 And Me data can be misused but, aside from police (who could get the data anyway), most of them are kind of theoretical or contingent on technological developments.
Like, 23 And Me data going to the highest bidder is obviously disturbing but I’m not sure it’s an immediate danger in the same way as all our SSN’s being sold on the dark web. I’d rather nationalize credit reporting agencies than the unprofitable ancestry report company.
Until you go to buy life, health, insurance. You start getting denied loans.
Because nobody trusts the public and the public doesn’t trust anybody.
Yet Millions of the same public gave 23nme their genetic data for basically nothing. So maybe trust isn’t the angle.
