Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire “substantially all” of 23andMe’s assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t give your data to companies: their executives and shareholders care more about their bottom line than your privacy.
Exactly, and you cannot hope to see any meaningful regulation out of the current government.
The company will just buy The Secret Service/Trump’s Presidential Library a fleet of Rolls Royce and he’ll intimidate congress into silence.
Nope, and not even because of the current administration: this country is by, for, and about rich people, and people are getting deliriously rich off of our data right now so there’s no political will to do anything about it.
AS soon as the data is secured, enprison the buyers
I never fell for it. I hope none of my siblings did, either.
I would have thought that data would be worth more. Maybe the AI guys will just steal it, instead?
Siblings and first cousins.
Most likely the data 23andme already gathered is enough to narrow down just about anybody in the US.
340 million and me
I wonder if there was anything in the T&Cs that mentioned extrapolation of data leading to identifying genetic relatives and whether their consent was void on this basis. Or whether this could be grounds for interesting lawsuits from nonconsensual relatives being identifiable from the participants’ data.
If we believe 23 and me, they have only recieved 11 data requests for 15 accounts and provided zero data to law enforcement.
https://www.23andme.com/transparency-report/
That is a report on formal law enforcement requests for direct account information. Law enforcement is known to use genetic ancestry, so either they are using other sites or just running the tests themselves instead of doing a formal request.
I couldn’t find a case for suing companies, just defense requests to dismiss using the data in court but I might not be using the right search terms.
Yes but what about the times law enforcement sent in the DNA and found relatives. Three are stories of that happening if I remember correctly.
What about the thing I said?
Law enforcement is known to use genetic ancestry, so either they are using other sites or just running the tests themselves instead of doing a formal request.
It’s a bit of both from what I gather. I.e. The Golden State killer was caught through GEDmatch and 23AM users have to manually upload their DNA profile to GEDmatch. On the other hand GEDmatch gave unrestricted, undisclosed access to law enforcement to dig throught their database until users started complaining and it became opt-in to allow LE access.
Fun fact, GEDmatch is now owned by Qiagen which operates in around 25 countries. I wonder how many DNA profiles they have access to. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve mapped the entire human species to some degree.
Wow guys, thanks a lot for the informative comments! I love how Lemmy isn’t just a minefield of memes and jokes in the comments like Reddit
My dad was all about this for a while, including convincing my siblings and a few of his siblings to get the report.
I guess that means I’m somehow linked in to this if I ever happen to leave my DNA laying around in the wrong place.
He’s awfully quiet about it now though.
In 30 years they’re going to squirt genetically modified copies of you into corporate artificial uteruses and that’s how they will meet their worker needs.
Dammit noooo there can only be one
Technically it won’t be exactly you as they’ll genetically change you to be more docile
Doubtful. Even one of me is pretty lazy. They’ll want someone more apt for their clone army.
Don’t worry that’s the parts they will genetically modify to make you more docile and servile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo#Investigation
Yeah, I would advice against becoming a serial killer for starters.
Of the 4 suspects they list, 2 “supposedly” confessed a murder to someone (which they didn’t do)
Confessions by proxy according to the article and cleared by DNA. I don’t see the relevance?
No relevance, sorry. It was interesting. Just goes to show the truthfulness of some testimonies.
Realistically, what could a company do with the data? I can see how it could be dangerous in the hands of a nation state if someone is a politician. But otherwise, besides the gross privacy violation, im not sure I see what real harm will come of this.
Ever see Minority Report?
That, but without the psychics. Insurance companies use things called actuary tables to estimate risk. If they have your DNA, they could decide that, since you have markers for early onset Alzheimer’s, they’re going to charge you double for life insurance.
Law Enforcement could decide that, since you share some trait with other common criminals, you’re more likely to do crime, and get warrants to surveil you more closely. Maybe you don’t do crime, but you get pulled in for a crime in the neighborhood because you’re the one with the highest crime DNA score, and that’s enough to convict you. Maybe you get pulled over more often for going a little over the speed limit, because you’re being watched more closely. Maybe they just decide you’re so likely to do a crime, they imprison you proactively.
None of this is absurd; it’s all been done before. The Nazis used to evaluate people by how big their skulls were - this is Eugenics on fucking steroids, backed by the smell of legitimacy because DNA. People have wrongly gone to prison and served entire sentences because of bad DNA testing, and it’s still used.
This should worry you. It’s not hypothetical, it’s not a conspiracy theory - the potential for abuse of a database like this should concern everyone, liberal or conservative.
Like all those white supremicists who discovered they have black ancestors; only, now, all their little KKK friends know, too!
If the state starts prosecuting DNA crime they’ll just swab people they don’t need a private firm barely anyone’s used to collapse.
Dodgy American insurance firms could try and get their hands on the data no doubt, but Regeneron has to abide by the same data protection rules as 23andme.
I honestly don’t know what they will do with snp data. These investors and VCs have been running scare peace articles for the last two years to drive the company into bankruptcy so that it could be sold and the data harvested. But I honestly think people are really overestimating the value of a dataset showing how different people are from a standard template. It’s good for ancestry and correlations but people forget they didn’t fully sequence samples. I fully expect the news cycle to change once they figure this out as they try to get people to resubmit DNA for nextgen sequencing, so they can try to salvage their investment.
The VC and founders should be painlessly deboned.
I think it’s weird you’ve made the assumption these professionals buying this haven’t already considered the things you’ve said… like that’s all looked at during the acquisition process
You don’t spend a quarter Bil without knowing what you’re doing. The company is involved in drug discovery.
You’d be surprised how much money gets wasted of stupid projects and acquisitions in biotech because some suit think they understand science better than their R&D team. For analogy sake think about all the stupid shit Microsoft bought and killed or all the chat apps Google created and killed, this going to be Regeneron’s Skype.
this going to be Regeneron’s Skype.
Microsoft didn’t kill Skype. Zoom popped up out of nowhere and killed Skype.
In the before times we used hamachi, but it was hard. Eventually, Skype was born and it was good and easy. It worked like a phone and many StarCraft 2 team games were won. But Skype was corrupted by the many Nigerian princes and hot Ladies who only needed a few dollars to turn your life around. This corruption was then baked so deeply into windows it took registry edits to exorcise it. But all was good was we now had discord which took the ideas of hamachi and Skype and delived a better experience than both.
Ah. You think Discord, that is not an free software product, controlled by one corpo, is immune to enshitification. When will people learn?
Definitely not, enshitification is real. I’ve gone from someone excited about new products to I don’t trust anything that I didn’t build. We are currently discussing moving our group chat off discord, but I’m biochemist and my circle are similar professions and I’m still learning how to properly host things.
I’ve not submitted my DNA to any genealogy sites for testing, but what annoys me about all this is that in order to get as much info about my family tree as possible (for posterity and confirming theorized connections) I SHOULD be testing my parents’s DNA because the oldest family members are the best for connecting to distant relatives, and my parents aren’t gonna live forever. But I can’t get them (or myself) tested, because of considerations like this. This shouldn’t have to be a consideration. But it is, because of greedy bastards and the gombeen politicians who allow stuff like this to be legal.
If you really want to get your parents sequenced for your own personal use without it going into a database it’ll cost you about $500 per sample (cheaper if you know someone who can extract the DNA for you). You’ll get a set of fastq files for the reads that will cover almost their entire genome that you can then use with public databases or just store for future use. Another option is to sign up for a university study but you’ll have to be comfortable with their data use.
Ah yes. Literally giving your fucking DNA to some private company just so they can tell you that your great grandfather is from Ireland. Who could’ve predicted this going wrong.
Fucking white people doing anything to get an identity.
The worst part is there is cool, if very boomer dad coded, ancestry research. It however involves reading a lot and lot of bureaucratic documents from hundreds of years ago and attaining quite some fields of knowledge to figure out how names shaped over time, how the bureaucratic institution in $time and $place work and such.
A friend of mine does it and he can trace one root of his family back to the 15th century within like a 30km radius circle. It’s really cool to see where, when, and therefore likely why, his family moved about for 500 years to end up where they are now instead of getting “you are probably from europe and 2% neanderthal”
Standard hexbear user.
Shoutout to my dumbass relatives for sending their DNA to this company—thanks for nothing!
Lol no regulation needed huh
I remember when I was younger and I was really learning about the capitalist system, but not from a communist point of view or a socialist point of view. I was just caught up with libertarianism and right-wing ideology and whatever, but nothing like it is today and I was learning about IBM and how they categorize the Jews in the camps. And then I realized all these corporations all have a legacy of brutality. There’s more to all this, and people are just not strong enough to accept what’s happening in our country. I’m a Libertarian Socialist.
I literally had an econ professor years ago who directly told us “do not take a genetics test”. This was before the ACA
The reason was simple. It’s information that once a private company gets a hold of it, they will use it to hurt you. Whether it’s a drug company that learns you’re predisposed to addiction, so better to give you it people around you nice temporary discounts on addictive meds, or an insurance company that learns you’re predisposed to cancer, so better to look for ways to deny or drop coverage.
Once these companies know a little bit about your nature, they’ll exploit any aspect possible to increase profits.
This was not a progressive/socialist econ professor. Just someone who knows how capitalism works.
Unfortunately, it is too late. They don’t need your specific genetic code to extrapolate about you, just the code of one of your relatives who wanted to find out their heritage for fun.
Without serious privacy laws we will be used and abused by corporations, get ready to experience Gattaca in real life.
Oops.
Hey - don’t give your data to a corporation if at all possible. kthx
This is such a dramatic understatement. They didn’t just sell the genetic data of those 15 million customers. They sold the data of everyone they’re related to, as well. Which is the majority of the population.
You really don’t need to sample a large percentage to get the data of almost everyone.
My aunt did this along with posting a bunch of family photos and falling for those quizzes that ask your pet’s name or your childhood address. If you have one person like that the privacy of your entire family is compromised.
We told her back around 2010 not to do this kind of stuff, but she’s somewhere between “If I have nothing to hide” and “what’s the harm?”. I hope she gets it now, but we don’t talk to her often
People like that doesn’t know how much we have to hide.
I don’t even want people to know how I wipe my ass, let alone what genes I have.
Ahha fuck this is the same company I saw Martin Shrekli hawking. Its gonna be absolute fuckery good bye
entirely fucking predictable. and 256 mil is chump change for essentially genetic data that could be extrapolated to most of the country.
Especially considering who bought it.
i can only imagine someone buying that data is up to no good. who is “regeneron” really?
What is known, at least publicly, about Regeneron?
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data protection is at risk of becoming an oxymoron
Hahahahahaha
