
Ask HN: Would you trust an ancestry DNA test? - ahmaman
Wonder if they really work and what are the risks with sharing my DNA with a private company.<p>Any recommendations?<p>EDIT:<p>For some context, I am living in the EU.
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probinso
Yes there are lots of risks.

At an individual level: even if there is no governmental back door, the
necessity for a warrant and the criteria to award one scales significantly
based on who a person is investigating. If a warrant cannot be awarded against
you specifically, lower criteria maybe awarded against relatives. Poor quality
assurances could result in contamination of your sample. This is known to have
happened in other countries for DNA material. Additionally, geans Express
differently due to environmental pressures of an individual. Your DNA can
provide information about your socioeconomic background and your upbringing.
understanding the threat model of providing your DNA to a private company is
important.

On an societal level: DNA is a fingerprint, that at scale can be used to
identify protected groups. Providing your DNA allows for scale analysis
against known traits of you and your compadres. This enables all sorts of
dangerous future sciences. Medical IRBs are usually tasked with specifying
their direct application that requires access to medical material. This
requirement helps to prevent against arbitrary and scaled surveillance of
populations. The private companies are not held to the same standard. You are
giving or selling them access to your current expressed genome set.

Finally, a measure against good: private companies for which you give
arbitrary data do not have to tell you the consequences of your shared data.
There is nothing that requires the company to even do anything with your data.
There is also nothing preventing the company from reselling or redistributed
your data in many cases. If a company is purchased, terms of service may
change from underneath your provided sample. You do not know the applications,
nor do you know if there is any measurable benefit.

I would only participate in a program like this if there was a hard specific
benefit to my life, and if I was beyond the age of trivial legal in
discretions and had no intention of having children.

~~~
ahmaman
Would love to see a device that I can locally analyse the results without
sharing the data to any company.

On the other hand, the way I understood it, is that the more data available,
the more accurate are the analysis results.

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hprotagonist
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-
twins-m...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-
marketplace-1.4980976)

no, not really.

 _Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly,
bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and
Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis.

Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching
results from any of the companies._

~~~
dekhn
I read through the article and the argreement between the twins is about what
you'd expect. Twins don't truly have identical genomes, and these are
estimates, so there is going to be some variance around the estimated value. A
few SNP differences can explain this.

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pel0
Smarter Every Day made a pretty interesting video about 23&Me.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EEmVfbKNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3EEmVfbKNs).

I'm not pro/anti 23&Me or anything but it brings an interesting perspective.

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krageon
You live in the EU and you propose exporting what is arguably your _most_
personal data to a country that has notoriously lax safeguards and routinely
hides those dark patterns behind lazy money-centric arguments. Ask yourself if
you are okay with another party selling your sequenced DNA data to a party
that you don't and can't know. If the answer is yes, then you can use them!

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koeng
As someone in the biological field, I personally don’t trust ancestry DNA
tests, but I’d be much more likely to trust full-genome sequencing rather than
SNP sequencing. Plus, you can have a lot of fun with bioinformatics if you get
full genome sequences from your family members.

~~~
iudqnolq
I have no knowledge about biology, but am interested in knowing more about
myself. Is any of what you said something a motivated outsider could learn
well enough to get and interpret their own results, and if so do you have any
pointers?

~~~
ahmaman
I subscribe to this, would also be interested to hear more!

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RaceWon
Risks: finding out that you have a high chance of developing a dreadful life
altering and/or ending disease. What would you do then? That news would likely
destroy your life. Personally I'm adopted; so my family medical history is a
blank slate, and I'm delighted by that--no dark clouds on my horizon.

In terms of your ancestry: you're probably human, just like me.

Cheers!

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iudqnolq
I'd talk with your family. You might discover that one of them has already
shared their information, in which case your losses are minimal, or you might
find out that one of them values their shared DNA not ending up in a database
highly. Either way, I don't think it should only be your decision.

I'd also recommend you Google further. There are a multitude of companies in
this space. 23&Me is the household name, but if you want more complex to
interpret but more detailed data alternatives exist. What's right for you
depends on your goals. Hereditary info? Medical?

~~~
tehlike
This sounds nice in theory, and also points out to the privacy aspect from
family tree pov,but in practice, it will be a futile exercise I'm afraid.

I'm kind of lucky in that I'm not originally from us and all my family is
elsewhere and not interested in ancestry tests.

That said, I think I forgot to opt out from dna tests for my daughter's birth,
so I'm probably already out of luck.

~~~
iudqnolq
If I were you - and of course I'm not - I'd figure out for sure who has your
daughter's DNA.

If there's no privacy penalty I'd always value knowing myself better.

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charliechang
Regarding the second part of your question.. As a person who worked there, I
can tell you they take the care of your dna much more seriously than other
companies. They know that what's good for customers is good for business. The
company has huge legal pull from on staff lawyers who keep the customers best
interests at the forefront (to avoid even potential lawsuits). I'm not
speaking from a pro-company stand point (as I mentioned, I work-ed there), but
from someone who knows the details.

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muzani
Not much more than I'd trust a fortune teller. The results seem quite highly
random even for siblings. It's more like a party trick to have fun with but
not entirely inaccurate.

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buboard
You have nothing to fear. You are already fingerprinted. Social networks have
6 degrees of separation. Genetic networks have 3.
[https://blog.23andme.com/news/make-that-three-degrees-of-
sep...](https://blog.23andme.com/news/make-that-three-degrees-of-separation/)

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psv1
I trust them in the sense that I've used 23andme and then shared that dataset
across a few other similar services. The actual utility was questionable - it
fell in the category of expensive info-tainment for me, but I might just be
biased because there was nothing all that remarkable in my results.

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senectus1
no

I Don't trust that organisation as far as I can collectively toss them.

~~~
ahmaman
What are in your opinion the worst case scenarios when it comes to sharing
your DNA?

