

How DNA Site 23andMe Outed Parents Who Gave Up Their First Baby - taylorbuley
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/05/16/dna-site-23andme-outed-parents-who-gave-their-first-baby-up-for-adoption/

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benatkin
Accusatory linkbait title. Makes it sound like it was publicly shown. The
"outing" was a user of 23andMe confronting her mother. Also making this case
less random was that the man who was adopted joined specifically to try and
find out about his origins.

Finally, why not mention turning off the family finder feature as the first
option, in the text below? Seems to be optimizing for sensationalism.

 _If you’re afraid to find hidden relatives in your closet, you might want to
stay away from DNA sites, or use 23andMe and simply turn off its “family
finder” feature — which is basically like Facebook’s friend finder, but using
genetic code instead of email addresses._

~~~
ajross
Yeah, this is distorting. What happened was that two _adults_ got _their own_
genomes sequenced and discovered they were siblings and that their parents had
hidden this fact. There was no privacy violated at all here, both of them had
every right to this information.

~~~
_delirium
There's traditionally been a view that parents who give babies up for adoption
have a right to privacy, and not even the children, upon reaching adulthood,
can retrieve that information. The main purpose of that policy is to encourage
adoption over other alternatives, such as in earlier eras infanticide, and in
more modern eras elective abortion. Now, technology makes it so that the
children themselves can retrieve the information even if the state considers
it private and won't divulge it. I tend to agree that this isn't doing
anything wrong, but it unsettles the previous privacy status-quo and the
policy that was based on it.

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civilian
I'm a member of 23andMe. I have my mom's face and my dad's bad sense of humor,
so there were no surprises when it was confirmed that they are my biological
parents. :)

However! In order to see close relatives (anything closer than 4th cousins)
you actually have to click a checkbox and confirm that you want to see who
you're closely related to. And the other person has to also. 23andMe WARNS you
that you might be surprised at the results.

So yeah. 23andMe is awesome, title is linkbait. You should disregard the silly
article and become a customer of 23andMe, it's important to know your own
genetics. It only costs 200 bucks-- compare that cost to future medical costs
that you don't prepare for!

~~~
jes5199
I'm also very happy with 23andMe. It's really quite cheap, it has some cool
ancestry visualizations, and it told me about some health risks I should pay
attention to.

I think the privacy questions are overblown. I don't particularly feel like I
"own" my DNA, anyway - I leave bits of it around everywhere I go, I share the
majority of it with all the members of my species and the entirety of it with
my family members. It seems like a fundamentally open-source aspect of nature.

~~~
kennu
It's still a very different scenario to specifically acquire a single targeted
person's DNA which they left lying around, than to collect a massive database
of millions of people's DNA that you can use to make all sorts of queries for
whatever purpose you wish.

E.g. insurance companies wouldn't go through the trouble of following around
their customers to catch their DNA, but they certainly would like to have that
database which can predict their future illnesses.

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shabble
Despite comparing people explicitly submitting their own DNA in order to
search for traits or relations with law enforcement DNA matching, the article
misses a pretty fundamental issue:

What access does law enforcement (or "The Government" agencies in general) to
the 23&me and other commercial DNA databases? A quick skim of their ToS
suggests the general "and everything necessary to comply with laws/court
orders" clause, which sounds to me like you could drive a truck through it.

I think privacy issues such as that could be a pretty big stumbling block to
mass adoption once price comes down (and utility via detectable traits goes
up).

Can anyone shed more light on exactly what their T&C permit?

Edit: and, if it differs, what you think it _should_ permit? I seem to recall
from other situations that entirely speculative 'fishing expeditions' on
databases are frowned upon, but the sheer benefit to LE faced with an unknown
sample is massive, and bounded only by user adoption and their access.

~~~
zmmmmm
This is why I don't think the DNA revolution will truly happen until we're all
carrying it around on our smart phones. There's a gold mine waiting for
somebody who figures out how to do decentralized exchange and comparison of
genetic information in a secure, peer to peer / aggregated fashion without
requiring huge centralized databases.

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mindcrime
_“the government’s compelling interests to identify arrestees, solve past
crimes, and exonerate innocent suspects] far outweigh arrestees’ privacy
concerns.”_

And therein lies a fundamental problem with the court system. At the end of
the day, our hopes for "checks and balances" aside, the courts are part of the
State, and they are going to - on average - protect the interests of the State
over those of the individual.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
You lose a lot of your rights once you become a convicted criminal
(particularly a felon). It is no surprise that this would be one of them.
Sometimes I think they should put more effort into publicizing all the stuff
you have to give up if convicted of a crime. It might actual serve as a
deterrent. Clearly the threat of being put in jail is not working as a
deterrent.

~~~
perspectiveless
If going to jail where you can get raped, beaten and killed does not work as a
deterrent why would something less severe work as a deterrent?

Sometimes I think trying to solve the root cause of crime would be more
effective than increasing the punishments.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Good point. Although not everyone ends up in the rapin', beatin' and killin'
jails.

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jack-r-abbit
We should just start looking at DNA collection as piracy (since you aren't
really _losing_ your DNA... the law men are just sharing a copy of it). And
don't we all love piracy around here? :)

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barbazfoo12
23andMe has some very close connections to Google.

An affinity for collecting personal information on others runs in the family.
;)

