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.
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.
Hindsight is 20/20. ITT lots of folks proud of themselves for not falling into this trap, but try to understand, 23andme was named “invention of the year” by Time in 2008. That’s before google and facebook even began monetizing private data. Data privacy, or even the power of data itself, was hardly appreciated by private companies let alone in the public consciousness.
Orphans, people with absent parents, decedents of slaves, the list goes on for folks who would understandably go for an affordable way to access their genetic history. Sure, their were plenty of folks since then who had all the information and still went for it, but what about all those who became aware of it too late and when they requested their data be deleted were told it would be kept for 3 years!
I’m saddened to see more victim blaming here than anger at the ToS/privacy policy fuckery and a complete lack of consumer protection.
I only want to disagree about Facebook not monetizing private data in 2008.
My wife was in politics/campaign management. They were already selling fairly sophisticated targeted ads by then.
I was shocked/terrified by how well they were targeting and it wasn’t even close to what they have today.
FUCK CORPORATIONS.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2019712_2019694_2019588,00.html
You’re probably affected by this even if you didn’t participate.
The thing about genetics is you can make reasonable predictions about individuals if you have data on their relatives. Heck, you can reasonably make regional predictions with genetic data that will be fairly accurate.
If any of your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, etc took this test, then you are now at least a little exposed.
I didn’t get the choice when my easily fooled parents decided it was a good idea.
We tried the ‘delete your 23 and me data’ but who the fuck knows if that works.
Now some corpos own my DNA probably.
Thanks mom.
People are too trusting
Degrading minds are very trustful. It’s why telemarketers target retirement homes.
This is probably the worst thing that will ever happen to you in your life
Nah man I was born over 3 decades ago
By 2008 we were well into the “you should know better than give up personal data” era. That is no excuse. People are just stupid and don’t care.
There were all sorts of publications telling people to protect their personal information, online and in the meat world by 2001, let alone 2008.
I don’t want to victim blame, but going right into this with all the warnings seems pretty stupid to me.
Now what does suck, and horribly so, is that there should be nothing of value gained from that data: there should be laws against nearly everything they could use for corporate advantage, exploitation, identity, etc. With severe consequences.
That is the failure.
They used to tell us never tell anyone your name on the internet. This was in the 90s.
Well, yes, the sad reality is that very many people are rather stupid. This won’t change and we should treat it as a fact - people are always going to fall for schemes. I think the fact that they’re stupid doesn’t mean they deserve to be exploited, though. This is a failure of laws and regulations.
Agreed. And basically that is exactly what I said.
Anyone trusting anyone else in a capitalist society is signing up to be the sucker. Has been this way for 200 years.
Historically illiterate populace.
I’ve publicly uploaded mine to anywhere that’s take it anyway who cares. Unless you’re American there’s no huge risk. If they use the anonymised data to discover new drugs and treatment then I’m glad to contribute. It’s only <0.1% of your genome.
It’s not a individual problem of personnal responsibility