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.
Hahahahahaha
This is probably a good time to remind ourselves of the time 23AndMe genetic data got hacked and most likely sold on the dark web. This data is all over the place at this point, and it affects not just the individuals who took the tests but also their relatives.
data protection is at risk of becoming an oxymoron
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[edit: around the time] google and facebook had begun 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, there 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.
Don’t give me that ‘hindsight is 20/20’, it was the first thought I had when I heard about this.
‘How are they going to monetize this?’
Either they sell your data, or they go under and… sell your data.
There was no other option from the inception.
None of this is new, and private companies gobbling up any data they can hasn’t been new since at least 2005.
It shouldn’t take hindsight to read the fine print in your 23andme contract. They straight up told folks, that taking their test meant signing over ownership of your DNA samples to them, for whatever future purpose they had in mind.
Anyone who didn’t clue in to the fact that meant they were paying that company to own the rights to their DNA, is an idiot.
Hardly. It stated that you could request to have the sample destroyed and your data removed. it’s also been revised multiple times. You read the contract, no?
You read the privacy policy & ToS fine print of every product, service, software you use? And every revision. Even when it’s not broadcasted? The contract / “informed consent” model is totally broken. You really want to build your stance on these issue around the claim it’s a reasonable system anyone can and should have to navigate?
Man, when I read the terms of service, it seemed pretty clear who owned your sample…and it wasn’t me. That’s the biggest reason I have never used one of these services. It seemed like an outright scam. I can’t speak to any changes made over the years, but at the time I looked into it, it was a hard nope for me. I have no idea why anyone would voluntarily give their DNA to a company like that, without a full guarantees it wouldn’t be used exclusively for their own profit.
If you read terms of service and think anything is clear then you have a gift that not many possess. I hope you can appreciate that. Sure, there are a lot of folks who should know better, but there’s also a lot who are bad at navigating these things. It’s by design. I think it benefits us to be sympathetic and welcoming, and to direct our anger at companies and laws. We need the privacy mindset to spread and fast. I think I understand where you’re coming from though. It’s so frustrating to care about privacy more than most people.
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.
You’re right. My mistake. I was going off memory and 2009 came to mind, but now that you mention it I do remember hearing about tech for the 2008 election- but I heard that years later, after cambridge analytica. All’s to say, it was emerging around that time and it wasn’t a big, public announcement. People around the epicenter knew but most were in the dark. I know i was, till the mid 2010’s. Since then I have 0 trust in big tech/most corporations, but I’ve definitely made my share of mistakes and wish there were more protections/public education.
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.
Wasn’t 23 and me already a corpo that owned it though
People are too trusting
Degrading minds are very trustful. It’s why telemarketers target retirement homes.
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.
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.
Yes, I know. As I mentioned in another reply, I was mentioning it only to give a sense of timeline and hype. Not a justification. Nice gotcha, but misses the broader points.
It’s not about blaming the victims, but correctly identifying what caused the situation and give society at large a better chance of avoiding it from happening again. From not trusting magazines about how secure the new wondertech is, all the way to not reading and understanding the legal paper and agreements they’ve agreed to.
I don’t believe people should be robbed of their agency - You even bring up many good reasons for using 23AM despite being aware of the potential privacy issues. Rather, people should have the information to make a concious choice.
The blame for the situation is with the company. The crucial choice was always in the hand of the users.
i feel saddened that people focus entirely on hindsight but take the current situation as inevitable result of the past, and regard it as unchangeable.
no, this does not have to be treated like any other capitalist asset. if there’s a shred of belief that the privacy and dignity of us humans matters to us now in 2025, just get together and disown 23andme, nuke the data, and turn the page.
unfortunately we have to stick harder to the principle of capitalism than any crusader in the middle ages had to stick to the Bible… helpless powerful species
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.
And you went straight into doing it again! Amazing
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.
99.9% of your genome is exactly identical to every other human on Earth. <0.1% just means they aren’t storing things that don’t change between people, because why would they?
The 99.9% similarity refers to humans having nearly identical DNA sequences, but that doesn’t mean we express our genes the same way. Gene expression varies widely due to regulatory sequences, environmental factors, epigenetics, methylation, and more.
23andMe only analyzes a small, curated set of common SNPs, covering maybe 5 - 10 percent of the known functional and trait-associated genome. It doesn’t sequence most rare variants, the full exome, or structural elements.
Recent research is also starting to highlight the growing importance of the dark genome, revealing that non-coding regions we’ve dismissed as junk DNA play significant roles in regulation and disease.
That’s all true, but also completely irrelevant to the point I was making. Gene expression isn’t in that 99.9% of the DNA that is the same. All of the individually identifiable genetic information in the genome is in the other 0.1%. This is a privacy community. A complete understanding of how genetics works is neat and all, but it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. I didn’t say that all humans 99.9% identical to each other. That’s obviously not true. I said that there’s no point in storing duplicate copies of identical genetic sequences, and that saying they store less than 0.1% of your genome only says they’re not doing that.
For the record, 5-10% is way plenty to narrow things down to a very tiny number of people. Probably one in most cases, and it contains a lot of important medical information. That’s not some trivial unimportant thing.
I remember when I was younger and I was really learning about the capitalist system, but not from a communist point of view or a socialist point of view. I was just caught up with libertarianism and right-wing ideology and whatever, but nothing like it is today and I was learning about IBM and how they categorize the Jews in the camps. And then I realized all these corporations all have a legacy of brutality. There’s more to all this, and people are just not strong enough to accept what’s happening in our country. I’m a Libertarian Socialist.
I literally had an econ professor years ago who directly told us “do not take a genetics test”. This was before the ACA
The reason was simple. It’s information that once a private company gets a hold of it, they will use it to hurt you. Whether it’s a drug company that learns you’re predisposed to addiction, so better to give you it people around you nice temporary discounts on addictive meds, or an insurance company that learns you’re predisposed to cancer, so better to look for ways to deny or drop coverage.
Once these companies know a little bit about your nature, they’ll exploit any aspect possible to increase profits.
This was not a progressive/socialist econ professor. Just someone who knows how capitalism works.
Unfortunately, it is too late. They don’t need your specific genetic code to extrapolate about you, just the code of one of your relatives who wanted to find out their heritage for fun.
Without serious privacy laws we will be used and abused by corporations, get ready to experience Gattaca in real life.
This is such a dramatic understatement. They didn’t just sell the genetic data of those 15 million customers. They sold the data of everyone they’re related to, as well. Which is the majority of the population.
You really don’t need to sample a large percentage to get the data of almost everyone.
My aunt did this along with posting a bunch of family photos and falling for those quizzes that ask your pet’s name or your childhood address. If you have one person like that the privacy of your entire family is compromised.
We told her back around 2010 not to do this kind of stuff, but she’s somewhere between “If I have nothing to hide” and “what’s the harm?”. I hope she gets it now, but we don’t talk to her often
People like that doesn’t know how much we have to hide.
I don’t even want people to know how I wipe my ass, let alone what genes I have.
Ahha fuck this is the same company I saw Martin Shrekli hawking. Its gonna be absolute fuckery good bye
entirely fucking predictable. and 256 mil is chump change for essentially genetic data that could be extrapolated to most of the country.
Especially considering who bought it.
i can only imagine someone buying that data is up to no good. who is “regeneron” really?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t give your data to companies: their executives and shareholders care more about their bottom line than your privacy.
My dad was all about this for a while, including convincing my siblings and a few of his siblings to get the report.
I guess that means I’m somehow linked in to this if I ever happen to leave my DNA laying around in the wrong place.
He’s awfully quiet about it now though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo#Investigation
Yeah, I would advice against becoming a serial killer for starters.
Of the 4 suspects they list, 2 “supposedly” confessed a murder to someone (which they didn’t do)
Confessions by proxy according to the article and cleared by DNA. I don’t see the relevance?
No relevance, sorry. It was interesting. Just goes to show the truthfulness of some testimonies.
I honestly don’t know what they will do with snp data. These investors and VCs have been running scare peace articles for the last two years to drive the company into bankruptcy so that it could be sold and the data harvested. But I honestly think people are really overestimating the value of a dataset showing how different people are from a standard template. It’s good for ancestry and correlations but people forget they didn’t fully sequence samples. I fully expect the news cycle to change once they figure this out as they try to get people to resubmit DNA for nextgen sequencing, so they can try to salvage their investment.
You don’t spend a quarter Bil without knowing what you’re doing. The company is involved in drug discovery.
You’d be surprised how much money gets wasted of stupid projects and acquisitions in biotech because some suit think they understand science better than their R&D team. For analogy sake think about all the stupid shit Microsoft bought and killed or all the chat apps Google created and killed, this going to be Regeneron’s Skype.
this going to be Regeneron’s Skype.
Microsoft didn’t kill Skype. Zoom popped up out of nowhere and killed Skype.
In the before times we used hamachi, but it was hard. Eventually, Skype was born and it was good and easy. It worked like a phone and many StarCraft 2 team games were won. But Skype was corrupted by the many Nigerian princes and hot Ladies who only needed a few dollars to turn your life around. This corruption was then baked so deeply into windows it took registry edits to exorcise it. But all was good was we now had discord which took the ideas of hamachi and Skype and delived a better experience than both.
Ah. You think Discord, that is not an free software product, controlled by one corpo, is immune to enshitification. When will people learn?
Definitely not, enshitification is real. I’ve gone from someone excited about new products to I don’t trust anything that I didn’t build. We are currently discussing moving our group chat off discord, but I’m biochemist and my circle are similar professions and I’m still learning how to properly host things.
I think it’s weird you’ve made the assumption these professionals buying this haven’t already considered the things you’ve said… like that’s all looked at during the acquisition process
I’ve not submitted my DNA to any genealogy sites for testing, but what annoys me about all this is that in order to get as much info about my family tree as possible (for posterity and confirming theorized connections) I SHOULD be testing my parents’s DNA because the oldest family members are the best for connecting to distant relatives, and my parents aren’t gonna live forever. But I can’t get them (or myself) tested, because of considerations like this. This shouldn’t have to be a consideration. But it is, because of greedy bastards and the gombeen politicians who allow stuff like this to be legal.
If you really want to get your parents sequenced for your own personal use without it going into a database it’ll cost you about $500 per sample (cheaper if you know someone who can extract the DNA for you). You’ll get a set of fastq files for the reads that will cover almost their entire genome that you can then use with public databases or just store for future use. Another option is to sign up for a university study but you’ll have to be comfortable with their data use.
Oops.
Hey - don’t give your data to a corporation if at all possible. kthx
