I know genomes and I didn’t delete my data from 23andMe

Okay but like, I'm not planning on committing a crime and nothing I do now is considered criminal, but let's play out the worst case scenario and a fascist government comes to power and something I do now is considered criminal and they can place me doing it with this DNA that as the author describes can narrow down if it was me pretty easily.

You can tell me I'm paranoid or something, but I can also just not give them my DNA for no effort and be all the more better off if something like this happens OR if I do commit a crime under current laws I haven't given up the ghost immediately.

This feels like short term little gain for catastrophic effects in the worst case scenario.

The author also makes this like a weird dichotomy with online tracking, I ALSO care about being tracked on the internet and my personal privacy is pretty important to me in general.

I want all of my privacy, or better worded I want privacy to be my choice such as here on HN where I use my real name intentionally. :)

The article fails to explain why you shouldn't delete your DNA data at 23 and me. It does a good job explaining why the risks of letting them keep it are exaggerated, which might be true (I'm still skeptical), but what is the reason why you should let them hold onto this information? What is the advantage to me to let them keep my DNA data?

(Disclaimer: I never used 23 and me, so this is entirely hypothetical for me.)

How did this article get so many upvotes?

I could write the same article with a little bit of help from ChatGPT, even though I know almost nothing about genomes. Well, in fact, I can't really tell what the author's expertise in genomes is from the article at all. I might as well ask a random stranger on the street about his opinion on the matter.

And if you think about it, "I know genomes" in the title is a giant red flag. It's basically saying, I am the authority, and you should trust me, even though my arguments are very weak and barely convincing at all. What kind of ** put that in the title?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

> That’s a tiny percentage: about 0.02% of your genome. So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it.

What kind of reasoning is that? Fine, they're not doing whole genome sequencing on you (yet), but having a detailed chip profile of several million informative SNPs absolutely can and will be used to profile you.

Very quickly and easily I might add.

Classical linkage analysis has been used quite effectively to profile people since the 80s using only a handful of (polymorphic) markers, because the power of the analysis is driven more by the number of related members than by the number of markers of an individual.

23&Me has a customer base of more than 10 million people(!!)

> The fact is that if you’re worried about privacy, you should be far, far more concerned about all the data that various companies are hoovering up about you based on your online activity.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

This analysis demonstrates what we call a "Fachidiot" problem in German - deep expertise in one domain coupled with troubling blindness to how that domain intersects with broader realities. The author's "just chill out" recommendation about permanent biological identifiers is about as reassuring as a nuclear physicist telling people not to worry about uranium enrichment because "it's mostly stable isotopes."

The "0.02% of your genome" framing is fundamentally misleading. Those ~640,000 SNPs aren't randomly scattered junk - they're specifically selected markers that correlate strongly with ancestry, health predispositions, pharmacogenomic responses, and familial relationships. The intelligence value isn't in raw percentage coverage but in what can be inferred from those curated data points. And you can infer an awful lot from these targeted markers.

The comparison to browsing history or social media activity is pathetically cavalier. We're talking about immutable biological data that:

    - Links you to family members who never consented to participate  
    - Allows inference about relatives' genetic predispositions based on your data alone    
    - Has unknown future applications as genomic analysis capabilities advance  
    - Cannot be changed, deleted from your actual biology, or "opted out of" once the implications are understood

This is exactly the kind of expert blind spot that leads to catastrophic privacy failures decades down the line.

> The fact is that if you’re worried about privacy, you should be far, far more concerned about all the data that various companies are hoovering up

I worked in DNA analysis for 6 years.

You should absolutely be worried about the data that various companies are hoovering up. Your DNA is part of it.

Data about me and what I click is one issue.

Data that can be used against my children is another.

My late wife had MS. It took her. Insurance companies would love that data to load against anything my kids do.

There are other issues but the fact is that companies will use DNA and every other data point they can to maximise what they take and minimise with loaded terms what they might, just might, maybe, pay out.

It's not about the now.

It's about the later.

This is staggeringly naive, holy moly. The idea that it's bad enough already, so might as well share DNA with a private company to put the proverbial cherry on top is... idk, nihilistic?

Here is my genome https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC

You'd think my ideal self-interest is for no one to volunteer for any research except my own relatives so that all medicine is optimized to my care. But that doesn't work that well. The genome itself is just not that useful. If you learn something from that VCF for a whole-genome sequence that's interesting, feel free to let me know.

I personally benefited from the aggregate that is the UK Biobank's repository of genome sequences and medical histories, and I'm grateful for everyone who contributed that for science. PGP is the closest I can get to providing my data apart from All Of Us which has a bit of medical data about me but no one has all my medical history.

I hope that, if nothing else, I am a piece in an instrument for humanity to comprehend the Universe. Either through my genome being useful when compiled with others or as a cautionary tale to making your genome available.

I wonder why he cares whether or not people delete their DNA?

I asked them to delete mine (although I'm not optimistic that they did so), and I'm glad that I did for two reasons. First, I don't think they dealt with me transparently and honestly from the start and second, whether or not that data is directly a risk to me, it's yet more data about me that's out there in the world and can be combined with other data to make a potent risk.

The less data about me that exists in any database, even trivial or apparently innocuous data, the better.

This a bone headed article… umm we can’t extract anything from it about your health (*now)… so might as well just spread it everywhere?

Like he doesn’t even go into the fact that it could be used by law enforcement wrongfully etc: e.g Unregulated Chinese crime detection startup buys the data, you happen to be in China and get arrested bc they used inadequate algorithms that wrongfully accused you.

There is absolutely nothing convincing here.