It markets its DNA kits with promises that tug at the heartstrings: Discover ancestors. Strengthen family ties. Understand your life.
Aided by venture capital and a flood of savvy marketing, Ancestry LLC has grown to become the world’s largest DNA testing conglomerate. Since 2012, it has lured more than 5 million people to spit into tubes and add their genetic code to the world’s largest private database of DNA. It has also banked away the world’s largest collection of human spittle, numbering in the hundreds of gallons.
In the age of Facebook and Google, consumers seem comfortable surrendering their personal information to corporations that aggregate it and monetize it. But Ancestry and other DNA testing companies have added an audacious tweak: Consumers are now paying to hand over their genetic code, their most sensitive individual identifier, to companies that could monetize it far into the future.
Ancestry officials say they have state-of-the-art systems to prevent hacking and security breaches. So far the company has sidestepped privacy scandals that tripped up companies like Facebook, which allowed a political data firm, Cambridge Analytica, to access data from 50 million customers, or government agencies like the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which a few years ago exposed more than a million personnel records and security clearance data to hackers.
But a three-month review by McClatchy, including visits to Ancestry’s headquarters and a main testing lab, reveals a pattern of breached promises to customers, security concerns and inflated marketing pledges that could give consumers some pause:
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7 comments:
They are selling access to the DNA results to law enforcement!
It is a very sinister project to track everyone's DNA and ancestry back 2000 years to the time of Jesus Christ.
The 13 bloodlines of the illuminati have traced their DNA back to the Saducees who murdered Jesus Christ.
Now they want to know the descendants of the disciples, kings, and prophets.
Please, people have sent in their dogs saliva and these jokers have given them ancestry results.
Get the legal issues resolved or at some point IF law enforcement access is overruled in court horrible people will be released from prison.The Supreme Court needs to rule on this ASAP.Losing access to this database would be catastrophic.
Just wait until they sell your DNA info to Insurance companies, or it gets hacked, and sold to the highest bidder. Insurance companies would love to have that information, by any means. Only people destined to live (and pay for life insurance) until they are 90 or more, will be able to get life insurance. Future health issues foreseen by DNA testing will become "pre-existing" conditions, making health insurance exorbitantly expensive, or unattainable.
Nope, I won't give them the chance. Although I, like everyone else, would like to know more about what parts of Europe my ancestors came from, I would not trade my privacy for that information. Insurance is a gamble, and I am not going to give any insurance companies the opportunity to stack the deck into a sure thing for them, and against the people they insure. Insurance is supposed to spread the risk among large groups of people, and not to just eliminate any risk to the insurers.
Let the horrible people out of prisons, it is the Liberal thing to do!
There are horror stories related to this.
There is an old curse, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
I did the 23 and me DNA and allowed sharing to see who my close relatives are. I found some that I didn't know who were directly related to me through my father. In another words half sisters and brothers who were the products of my father infidelity when he was a traveling salesman.
This can be a total family destroyer! Like opening a Pandora's box of issues and problems that you really don't want to know or find out. I immediately turned off this notification when I saw this.
The bonus was in knowing my true ancestry. I knew I was British and German, but did not know I was also 4 percent Ashkenazi Jewish.
It was kind of interesting to find out about this and my percentages of each group and how far back this goes.
It can be a useful tool, but be careful about the family sharing. You might find something very unpleasant in your family history. Better to let dead dogs lie!
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