• reddig33@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I fail to see how having a huge sampling of human DNA data is “worthless”. Sounds like a management problem to me.

    • designatedhacker
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      7 months ago

      If you still have DNA data with them, delete your account and the DNA along with it. It really is valuable and you bet your ass it’s going to get sold if it’s still there at bankruptcy time.

        • Bonehead@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          It’s cute that you think the GDPR actually protects you and companies don’t keep your data rather than simply preventing you from seeing it, just like Reddit tried to do poorly.

          • Patches@sh.itjust.works
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            7 months ago

            It’s the best we’ve got ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

            I know the companies I worked for - took it seriously.

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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            7 months ago

            The company I work for also takes it seriously.

            The fun part is that our national privacy law beforehand wasn’t even that different. The most significant change that the GDPR brought, is that the maximum fine went up from 300,000€ to now 20 million € or 4% of annual turnover.

            And yeah, that change made all the difference.
            Now it’s a simple business decision to (mostly) comply with the GDPR, because there is a calculable risk+damages, which are higher than the cost for implementing the bare minimum in protections. They’re also definitely higher than the potential revenue, you could pull out of a single customer’s data.

        • designatedhacker
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          7 months ago

          I’ve seen some GDPR code. The easiest thing to do is delete anything associated with a deleted user after N days. Adding a condition on the country they told you they’re from without actual KYC is asking for trouble.

          Sure aggregate anononymized data sticks around. Maybe the anonymization isn’t built right, but it isn’t literally your DNA data unless they really fucked up GDPR compliance.

          I will caveat that a sufficiently motivated company might put in the hours to use at least billing info or shipping address. https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004944654-What-s-In-Your-Account-Settings

          They actually talk about opting you out of Research and discarding the sample (on the linked privacy page). The word delete isn’t explicitly used about the DNA data 🤔.

      • Hawke@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        delete … the DNA along with it.

        Did you just tell people to kill themselves?

    • jeffw@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I think they mean in the sense that the stock could be delisted and the market cap is literally like 1/20th of what it once was

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Everyone who would pay for this already has. It’s a collapsed model because there’s nowhere else to go.

      • reddig33@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The data is still valuable and can be sold to pharmaceutical and medical research among others.

        • stoly@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I agree but also think that the major value has been extracted already. It’ll probably be useful for scientific needs and has value there.

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Looked up the stock and it was one of those SPAC scams. SPACs have mostly been pump and dumps and I wouldn’t be surprised if they went the SPAC route to scam people out of a whole bunch of money so that they could use a fraction of that money to buy back the company and take it private. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got their buddies to short it to make even more money and hasten the stock reaching down to the point where they can take it private on the cheap and do whatever else they want to do to suck out more money from the operation without being beholden to the shareholders they scammed.

    • commandar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Ancestry is owned by Blackstone.

      Personally, that data being in the hands of private equity doesn’t really sit any better with me.