Who would've thought giving a private company your DNA data would be bad
Both of my estranged boomer parents did this, and 23andMe pretty much have my shit without my consent. Super cool!They have every American's shit. Most Europeans too. Spoiler, if your uncle and your random ass 3rd cousin got tests done, then you also basically got a test done. They don't need every single detail to draw a rough "good enough" circle around like "people with these genes in their family aren't worth the cost."
In my case, my sister and my dad, but yeah. Truly amazing results: they have genetic compositions you would expect from any random person with their ethnic backgrounds! This information was definitely worth eroding the privacy of our entire family tree.
My sister did that shit and the only information it gave was our parents’ home country, which we already know because they’re first gen immigrants
They don't know which allele is which though, they don't automatically know what combination would be you.
They could only confirm that you're related to your parents.
Honestly wouldn't surprise me at this point if the whole thing was a psyop to create a database of future undesirables.
Conspiracy aside, this will 100% be used to do this in a soft-fascist neoliberal "oh, it's potentially too expensive to care for these people" way.
I would not be surprised if this data ends up being used in background checks or some distopian shit to keep people from getting jobs or whatever.
Unlike in the treats tho I won't be able to sneak aboard a space shuttle so as always reality is worse than the dystopian fiction could have predicted.
We're already seeing talks of eliminating preexisting conditions. Insurance companies would be stupid not to buy consumer data to look for things. The GOP have been wanting to gut Obamacare since day one, which means democrats are going to outflank Trump by eliminating preexisting conditions because "Think of our poor, little insurance mom and pop small businesses!"
And just like last time IBM will be standing by to process the data.
Fuck, I just wanted to find out what my racial makeup was so I can feel like a sexy exotic mix /s
I remember hearing that if you're Black or Asian, they don't even give you any specific details lmao
It's how they get the results. They can only pinpoint specifics when more people of that ethnicity submit their DNA. Since a bunch of people in Asia and Africa don't give a shit about this stuff, they aren't submitting samples to build data off of. Your average Japanese person living in Japan, for example, maybe has some Korean, Filipino, or Chinese ancestry from a few generations back. But a lot of families have written records going back hundreds of years, so why would they want to pay for a test telling them something they already know?
There's a lot of Arab cultures like that, too, where they keep extensive records (orally or written) to the point they don't need DNA tests. I'm sure there's other places like that as well I'm just not familiar with.
It's really more of a western hemisphere thing where immigrants pretended to be from places they weren't or minorities lied about their ethnicities to avoid discrimination. Often you had Irish and Italians trying to pass off as French or English when coming through Ellis Island. Or people who were part black saying they were Native American or Greek so they could get into whites-only spaces.
"Says here you are 2.7% Scottish, 19% French-Burgundian, 4% from a tiny fishing village in Italy that hasn't had a name since Rome fell, 1/264th Cherokee, 15mm Transylvanian, 2 cubits Bohemian, and the rest is uhhh.." gestures vaguely toward Africa and Asia "China, I guess."
