23andMe Cashes In on Customer’s Data

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

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10 Responses

  1. Saul Degraw says:

    This is my shocked face. It looks exactly like my unshocked face.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    Will this drug actually be useful to help people or will it merely make money?

    Because if all it does is make money, we should probably get the government involved.Report

    • Aaron David in reply to Jaybird says:

      Inflammatory diseases. So, it could be kind of useful.

      But that doesn’t excuse the extraction method.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Aaron David says:

        Let me condemn the extraction method in the harshest possible tones.

        Will it help people with inflammatory diseases? Like, better than stuff on the market now?Report

      • PD Shaw in reply to Aaron David says:

        What’s wrong with the extraction method? Voluntary actions, full disclosures, and the choice of opting out of research use.Report

        • Aaron David in reply to PD Shaw says:

          I will admit that this goes against my Libertopian nature, but, for lack of a better word, it feels wrong. I know that the expression “the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away” is based in a reality that is served by lawyers, but at some point, we need to get away from that.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Aaron David says:

            Last week, I only lived in a world with 23&Me. This week, I live in a world with 23&Me and an additional inflammatory disease treatment.

            I guess I kinda understand why some people might be upset (“Hey! I deserve a piece of the profits for that medicine!”) but I’m not understanding the general sentiment that this is something that we want less of in the future.

            I would like 23&Me to come up with a couple dozen more medicines and I’m not sure why we’d want to nip those medicines in the bud.Report

  3. Chip Daniels says:

    It is ironic that we now live with cameras and recording devices in every home that can be activated without our knowledge, and a national database of DNA available to the police, and it just seems so normal.Report

  4. DensityDuck says:

    At first I was gonna post “this is sort of like the copyright/IP debate” and then I realized that no, it isn’t sort-of-like, it’s exactly the copyright/IP debate, because what is more fundamentally your own property than your actual DNA?

    And, y’know, yeah, there’s nothing in the TOS that says they wouldn’t not avoid doing something that wasn’t not this thing that they didn’t not refuse to do. That doesn’t mean people were informed that their DNA sequences might (and would) be exploited to generate revenue for third parties.

    On the gripping hand, tho, remember how there was that art show where the guy just took Flickr posts and printed them out and sold them for $100,000 because it was “a famous artist” doing it? a-ha, Richard Prince. Writing on the wall, as it were. You control nothing that you do not hold in your hand.Report