<story><title>23andMe tells victims it&apos;s their fault that their data was breached</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/03/23andme-tells-victims-its-their-fault-that-their-data-was-breached/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dekhn</author><text>To be honest it&amp;#x27;s amazing they are still in business.&lt;p&gt;The company was originally founded on unreasonable goals in the health industry, using DNA array testing to identify risky variants in individuals to help produce better treatments.&lt;p&gt;It took the CEO about a decade to learn enough to acknowledge that their approach would never have achieved this, because the mapping from genome to risk&amp;#x2F;treatment is a highly complex function and their mechanism was underpowered  and they also repeatedly pissed off and ignored the FDA who then shut them down for a while.  The only reason they survived this was, afaict, the CEO&amp;#x27;s ability to extract money from google to keep operating.&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the company found that they could do identity by descent really well, much more useful to customers than telling them their earwax properties, and their &amp;quot;recreational genomics&amp;quot; products were extremely popular- enough to sustain a service, but not really enough to sustain advanced research.&lt;p&gt;They finally got some pharma to give them a bunch of money for their data (basically all the genomic and phenotype data that they collected on their users) ostensibly to do translational health research, but this has not been very productive (and seems unlikely to be truly transformative).&lt;p&gt;In the meantime they have to keep runing their consumer platform and it clearly had security issues that permitted a large scale data extraction (that&amp;#x27;s on them, not the customers) and I jusrt can&amp;#x27;t see how they keep getting money to operate, because their track record in translating data to profit&amp;#x2F;medicine has been so skimpy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmatt</author><text>It cost me about $99 to get my DNA mapped by them a decade ago. I used a 3rd party service to sync my results with SNPedia which returned a pretty cool report, at the top of the report was a very dangerous gene I was the first in my family to discover, and has since saved lives. 23andme added that gene to their reports at least 5 years if not more later&lt;p&gt;My doctor scoffed at 23andme finding a dangerous genetic mutation and said its probably just a false positive. I had to spend $500 to get a single gene tested in a hospital, still came out positive.&lt;p&gt;So bang for your buck that $99 was a great deal for a full mapping, it feels like most of their issue is what the government allows them to show. Im pretty sure that SNPedia syncer isn&amp;#x27;t online anymore, but that was what made 23andme a great service for me</text></comment>
<story><title>23andMe tells victims it&apos;s their fault that their data was breached</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/03/23andme-tells-victims-its-their-fault-that-their-data-was-breached/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dekhn</author><text>To be honest it&amp;#x27;s amazing they are still in business.&lt;p&gt;The company was originally founded on unreasonable goals in the health industry, using DNA array testing to identify risky variants in individuals to help produce better treatments.&lt;p&gt;It took the CEO about a decade to learn enough to acknowledge that their approach would never have achieved this, because the mapping from genome to risk&amp;#x2F;treatment is a highly complex function and their mechanism was underpowered  and they also repeatedly pissed off and ignored the FDA who then shut them down for a while.  The only reason they survived this was, afaict, the CEO&amp;#x27;s ability to extract money from google to keep operating.&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the company found that they could do identity by descent really well, much more useful to customers than telling them their earwax properties, and their &amp;quot;recreational genomics&amp;quot; products were extremely popular- enough to sustain a service, but not really enough to sustain advanced research.&lt;p&gt;They finally got some pharma to give them a bunch of money for their data (basically all the genomic and phenotype data that they collected on their users) ostensibly to do translational health research, but this has not been very productive (and seems unlikely to be truly transformative).&lt;p&gt;In the meantime they have to keep runing their consumer platform and it clearly had security issues that permitted a large scale data extraction (that&amp;#x27;s on them, not the customers) and I jusrt can&amp;#x27;t see how they keep getting money to operate, because their track record in translating data to profit&amp;#x2F;medicine has been so skimpy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ravenstine</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s all about branding.  They got in early and really got their name out there.  Everyone has heard of 23 And Me.  Off the top of my head, I can&amp;#x27;t think of another brand (though I know they exist), and people I know IRL still refer to 23 And Me.</text></comment>