23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself

> So rather than $8 a share they get zero? Sounds like the board was the one that messed things up.

The share was trading at $8-$9 at the time.

The primary reason why the board has been rejecting the offer is that the CEO kept proposing discount prices to the market rate.

If they declare bankruptcy, then the creditors get first pick over assets. Several board members might be creditors.

Not zero; In all bankruptcies, the shareholders get whatever is left over after liquidating all company assets and paying back all creditors.

In most high-profile bankruptcies, there aren't enough assets to even finish paying creditors, yet alone creditors. However, this is a voluntary Bankruptcy, so there might actually be assets left over to pay out to shareholders.

I assume the value of the remaining assets are worth more than $8/share and she was trying to get them for a discount.

What does $8/share value the company at?

board probably thinks the assets remaining after the bankruptcy pays off the creditors is more than the $8/share?

Just because your batna is shit doesn’t mean you should sign everything.

No point in doing this. Just enriches the lawyers. Then Wojicki just flees the country and skirts any responsibility.

It might not be possible if there are tagalong/dragalong agreements. And from the perspective of a shareholder, the shares might become a bit of a riskier proposition if you allow her to control the company, vs the current status quo.

Yes but she will still have to abide by the covenants.

And those might include things preventing majority owner from buying everything at $0.01 per share.

No need for the friends to be involved -- she resigned prior the the bankruptcy filing so she can participate in the bidding process personally

Yes. And that often happens.

My shocking 23andMe story:

I reached out to a guy on 23andMe that was a DNA relative (2nd cousin) and said hi. Curious how we were related, I gave him some family names going several generations back, and asked if any of them rang a bell in his family history.

He responded quickly and said no, they did not.

Then a few weeks later I get another response. He said that one of the names had faintly rung a bell, and when he dug into it, it turned out that was the name of his mother's boss for much of her career as a secretary. His heart sank when he realized it. He and his siblings did genetic tests and confirmed that he, the youngest, was only a half-sibling. Both of the parents were deceased so there's no way to know what really happened.

After dropping that bomb in the poor guy's lap I stopped using the DNA Relatives feature.

The problem is you are not a malicious actor so you aren't coming up with good scams or truly malicious ideas.

How about scam emails that open by asking people about their family history of some disease with a genetic marker and promising some miracle treatment?

I can think of even worse outcomes depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts

1. "We found you are the product of infidelity. Pay to find out who." (Paternity tests are banned in France)

2. There is incest in your family. Pay to find out.

3. We have found 4 significant markers of X diseases. Pay to find out. (Against FDA in claims of illness)

4. A lost family member was found in $location. Do you want to identify them and send money? (Likely faked, scam)

5. Surrogate or adopted: we know your birth parents. Pay to find out.

There's just a few unethical and/or illegal business opportunities for malicious actors. And that was just 5 off the top of my head.

If you wanted to be really evil, you combine it with other hacked/leaked/ransomed data sources and turn the screws.

> Exposing infidelity is honestly the best I can come up with.

I'm concerned with being put on a list of ashkenazi, and sold to people who work for my death on that basis.

https://www.wired.com/story/23andme-credential-stuffing-data...

Once 23andMe gets sold, all of that data belongs to whoever owns it and they can sell it to whoever they want. Perhaps to the government where they can do a warrantless search to find a relative of someone who may have been at a crime scene. Or to other governments. Or to insurance companies who want to play deny, defend and depose. I get that a lot of genetic information isn't predictive, but not all of it is so questionable.

> at best sway the predisposition for disease by a modest degree

If insurance companies use this information to inform coverage decisions, then it's a moot point right? Just because you and I (who am also in this field) understand the limitations of the models and the data, does not mean that powerful entities will not use it to do stupid things.

Faking DNA test results would be sci-fi nightmare come true. You could frame someone before they were arrested which would be ... Frightening. But even worse is invalidation of all DNA evidence because it is now easy to fake.

But that still seems like a minute possibility.

Thank you for saying this.

I’ve done some of these saliva samples and I’ve seen the freak outs about what happens if “they” get my genome. But I cannot for the life of me figure out what they would do with it maliciously? It’s not like it can be used to sign up for a credit card or whatever.

There basically aren't any. Almost any entity that would want to buy the company should by definition not be allowed to do so.

The ideal solution would be for all data to be deleted before a sale. If anyone would want to buy 23andMe without the collected data then that's perfectly fine.

My ideal would be customers given the option to have it delete sold and profit split with between themselves and 23&me, or anonymised and donated to the human genome project.

So does the government and probably ancestors.com … what’s the big problem here?

But can it be isolated from the myriad of life floating around?

I doubt that specificity would be economically profitable.

The police did catch the Golden State Killer by scavenging a used coffee cup or somesuch, however.

Either way, for the company customers under this circumstance I'd absolutely recommend sending all possible means of requesting data deletion, at least there should be a paper trail that such thing was requested.

Looks like the company expects to remain operational during the bankruptcy/restructuring, so I would say yes.

Just requested my data deletion. Seems like it worked.

I think it's a mistake to think that the tyrannical governments of the future will be sophisticated. The way the trend is going, they will be ever more banal. They're not going to target a virus for you, they're going to knock down your door, shout at you, lock you up or shoot you. They likely won't even bother with having chatgpt write up a pretext for it.

That doesn't mean we can do nothing, but it means withholding information won't matter as much as some people think.

There's not much resistance to someone wanting your DNA. It's so trivial to get that you'd basically need to become a hermit to try and prevent it. A hermit that shaves themselves and burns their trash, one that lives with gloves on dyrung every waking hour and disinfects their chair and bed daily.

It's not really something the mass population can physically prevent from a determined actor. Like data, you need to regulate it instead of take excessive preventative measures.

No he didn't but his overly curious aunt Janice gave it to them.

you could have asked you primary care doctor for a test, instead of paying a company for the privilege of creating a dna map to sell to law enforcement.

Looking at my "Reports Summary", it's all mundane stuff like the toe thing I mentioned. It seems all the medically relevant stuff require premium subscription.

You might like Gattaca if you haven't seen it.

That sort of thing is already in widespread usage. For example palm geometry readers as a biometric factor to go along with a key card at a building entrance.

Although in the future I imagine it's more likely to be things like arm to torso ratio or gait recognition or similar, done via machine vision.

Like browser fingerprinting.

It possible with crypto shredding. You store everything encrypted with one key by customer. When you want to delete you erase the key. The data becomes unusable everywhere (backups included). Then a job periodically garbage collects data without a key, but that's more for cost saving.

Big companies do this but it requires some technical maturity. If you operate in Europe you have to implement proper data deletion. I would be more worried about small companies that large ones tombe honest.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soft_deletion

Our industry's dark secrets getting exposed like this ... yeah you are right, we don't even need a whistleblower for this :)

It is the law in California, and it is certainly possible at scale, just not cheap or trivial. Presumably, given the intense focus of the state government on their company in particular, they have long since implemented a compliant deletion mechanism!

The question, of course, is whether that same functionality is applied to residents of other states wishing to delete their data…

Soft deletion doesn't satisfy the company's obligation under the CCPA.

it very likely may not be per their own words. They are "bound by various legal and regulatory obligations that may necessitate retention of certain information". This came straight from their privacy team.

My half aunt who never knew who her father (my grandfather) was found my family through 23 and me relative matching. That's life changing, not gimmicky.

Or health insurers looking for markers of disease / chronic illness

The famous US data delete that is just a "soft delete". Maybe different in California. In the EU with GDPR, companies are required by law to have all your data deleted after a month from user deletion request.

Sure hope GDRP would cover that since it's involving "general data"/

I deleted my account and data (in theory) maybe several years ago.

It was actually the California State Attorney General.

they are all very different worlds. math works purely in theory and simply explains phenomenon. Likewise, much of software is ephemeral and gets its ethic indirectly once people are involved.

to work with life is to work in factors that directly affect others, Unless you're doing something like pure biology where you simply observe. Even then, the art of observing sentient beings has its hundreds of quirks.

How many second cousins does Mark Zuckerberg have?

Well to us Europeans it is. This is PII so its handling is documented.

You can requires all your data to be deleted and tastiest none is added.

This deletes the "family tree" to be seen by everyone