cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64477597
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.
wow nobody could have possibly predicted this
Thanks to my asshole cousin for giving them my family’s dna
My parents had me do it when I was a minor and did not know better. Asked 23andme to delete my data a few months before they announced bankruptcy. Think they actually did it? Lol
Your data has been deleted per your request
Love too have my bio data for sale on the advertising market because my family members are obsessed with their pedigrees like they’re a breed of dog
What do you mean, you did not vounteered to recive the Calipers Corporation newsletter?
People who made deletion requests about to find out some new terms like soft deletes, automated data reselling, and perpetual circulation.
I have a lib family member who is extremely upset about this and I’m just like
Maybe don’t give the mega corporation access to the fundamental building blocks that constitute you as a unique organism, is that to much to ask?
At least they have the comfort of knowing they’re 1/25th Viking.dont worry your whole extended family is compromised too!
What annoys me is that probably some uncle wanted to know exactly how related to “the old country” he was and now a 50% DNA match to me just got sold.
I’m very mad at bright eyed lib bio student me for doing it in college. I need to delete my data but also feel like it’s probably too late. Should do it anyway though.
yeah its too late now… a few weeks ago they were running the story on the news every day telling people to go delete their data but who knows who it was already sold to or where they’ve backed stuff up and didn’t tell anyone… regulations be damned
I’ll believe anything is truly deleted when I die. Until then I’m not taking any company at their word.
Never forget. These assholes. The ones in fuckin’ charge right now. The very same neolibs and tech people you see in the headlines. Most of them are still around. These are the same assholes that turned the internet into a nazi incubator in their attempts to monetize it.
You know that old philosophy joke that goes “if by pushing a button you got a million bucks but a person at random (not you) suddenly dies - would you press the button?”
Imagine instead a machine where every time you pressed it you got money but out in the world it converted a random person (not you) into a nazi. Would you push the button?
And for the finance ghouls and neolib goblins and techbros they’d push that button until the horde of freshly minted fascists physically dragged them from the control panel.
And we know this because that’s exactly what they did to the internet. In fact they are still hitting that button! Frantically! And some of the techbros hitting the nazi button are nazis themselves.
So yeah not trusting anything they say about data
100%
This would be illegal in the EU.
More like “they would have to pay some fine” illegal.
This will always be the case with any company that has data on us.
Eternal throwback to the etchics essay I wrote at uni when starting to study genetics, late 90s.
The conclusions I got to then kept me safe from this grift, but I am sure my extended family from one side that is obsessed with their kulak heritage has sent in all the samples to justify their rabid nationalism.
I got my mom to delete her data but who knows if that actually matters. There goes my hopes of being the next golden state killer I guess
My mom has been using the other DNA services and wants me to send in my samples because we don’t know much about my dad. I keep having to remind her about this shit because there’s no protections on your data and I’m not giving insurance companies an excuse to deny coverage because they got my genetic records. I sure as shit don’t want my information in a data base of undesirables. There won’t be any protections when fascists enact their final solution in the US.
if you golden state killer me i won’t tell anyone
Your DNA will be fed into an LLM and used to create weird worse facsimiles of people
I’m super thankful no one in my family (as far as I know) has used one of these. Tracking ancestry is super popular in my extended family/culture and the general consensus is dna kits are “cheating”, plus they wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know
Very early on with these companies, we started hearing about people who were convicted of crimes because their relatives had used the services and came up in DNA search results despite the fact that they had never committed crimes (not that that makes a difference, but still), and I made a point of never letting my spit rat someone out.
Surprise, fucking surprise that it’s come to even worse shit.
…weren’t they selling/reselling it the entire time?
i always thought it was weird when my friends gave facebook their info but… like, at least that wasn’t DNA?
Ah damn who knew those 50 bucks in college would have such dire consequences. Alas I was but a naive young man wanting to earn some beer money.
wait… they paid you?
Not sure about remuneration, but in some countries like mine, or “israel”, giving your DNA to a what-is-basically-governmental company is heavily encouraged and there are campaigns to promote it
yikes
it was part of a study some research team was doing on bi men (lol back when I still thought I was bi).
