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23andMe's business is basically worthless. Its CEO now wants to buy it.
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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I fail to see how having a huge sampling of human DNA data is “worthless”. Sounds like a management problem to me.
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.
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.
It's the best we've got ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know the companies I worked for - took it seriously.
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.
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 🤔.
Did you just tell people to kill themselves?
OMG DYS
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
Everyone who would pay for this already has. It’s a collapsed model because there’s nowhere else to go.
The data is still valuable and can be sold to pharmaceutical and medical research among others.
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.
Buy low, sell high. This is the way.