Or that he was, but one of the other three great-grandfathers wasn’t really the g-grandfather.
to me scary part of this is if insurance companies view this as a tool to use for pre-existing conditions (just kidding)
If you follow the instruction it will take you to a screen that will allow you to easily download your data to your laptop or phone, and it will take you to where you can delete you account. It only took me two minutes to do both. They make it surprisingly easy.
Downloading my raw data didn’t work.
They had to “generate a download link” and I just went ahead and deleted my data. It’s not like it’s very useful anyway. I did save my family tree.
Same here for me and spouse - the site seemed a little sluggish, but it definitely worked.
We didn’t have to deal with 2FA, though. (My keyboard knows my fingerprint.)
I didn’t bother to download anything as I already have my genetic data downloaded through Promothease. Not that I really care about it anyway - it would only be of interest if there were something out of the ordinary. For better or for worse, I am apparently pretty ordinary, except that my mitochondrial DNA is a rare haplogroup. So rare, in fact, that there is little data on whether it confers any advantages or raises the risks of any problems. Guess I’ll just have to live my life like they did in olden times, without knowing.
ETA: I just Googled it, as I do once a year or so, to see if there is any new research, and found they’re associating it with Vikings now. I suppose that’s a little cool. Not changing my name to Sigrid yet, though.
The Vikings did get around a lot, it’s true, so a trace of that is not surprising.
I’m not sure why you’re kidding about this. I think it’s definitely a risk – not tomorrow, but in 5 years? 10 years? I wouldn’t bet against it.
Same here. That’s where my mind went immediately.
Thats actually one that many states have gotten ahead of, thankfully: Summary of Laws Regarding Genetic Discrimination | American Civil Liberties Union
Edit: Better state by state table: Genetic Information State Laws | Triage Cancer
Here’s a fun fact. 23andMe and all of its data was stolen. The personal information of everyone with Askenazi heritage was leaked online. It was over shadowed because the leak was reported less than 24 hours prior to the October 7th massacre
After the last few months, I have little confidence that California’s laws (or that of any state) will protect me.
I don’t blame ya.
I’m probably in the minority here, but I never really cared that much about the privacy stuff. I was more hoping the genetic data could be combined with other data to be more useful in our daily lives.
When I first signed up for 23andme (a decade or so ago?) I was hoping that Google would eventually buy it (the CEO used to be married to a Google co-founder) and that Google would then be able to cross reference the genetic data with my shopping and search and Google Health and Fitbit histories to make an even more complete profile. Yes, I’m sure they’d love to use that for advertising, but if it could also offer better food recommendations, workouts, reading materials, etc., that would be cool. I’d have been happy to sacrifice some privacy for more utility.
I guess tech has gotten a lot more dystopian since then and people are more concerned about privacy, so the idea of total integration and complete voluntary surveillance isn’t likely to be a selling point anymore 
Oh, I’m sure it’ll still happen, but against our will now, and for more nefarious purposes than mere hypertargeted advertising. Alas.
thanks for serious reply–I added that phrase so people didn’t accuse me of conspiracy fanatic. Eugenics next?
Both of my parents are in 23andMe. I’m not sure if they were in that data dump, but both were 99.5%+ Ashkenazi.
As a genetics researcher this sounds amazing. As person living in a country that barely had any consumer protections before the current regime, this sounds scary.
A trace of Viking ancestry isn’t surprising, but in the mitochondrial line maybe is, because Viking women didn’t get around nearly as much as the men, and even the few who did would probably have come home to raise their children. For someone whose ancestry is outside of Scandanavia to have Viking mitochondria would require that, at some point, a Viking woman moved to wherever that person’s ancestors were, stayed there, and had at least one daughter. Could be an interesting story, if we could ever get the details (which we almost certainly can’t).
And in a striking coincidence, I just now came across this:
The value adds for the major DNA services is genealogical research, health research, and deep DNA research. The value of geneaological data is something that keeps evolving as other join the service, submitting their documents, family trees, and of course DNA results.
But health is health. Most of the findings weren’t very useful. You have wet earwax or dry earwax. You like cilantro or you don’t. You have the breast cancer gene or you don’t. It doesn’t change unless new genes are discovered. So while there’s scope to get repeat business from a DNA company, 23 capitalized on things that don’t get repeat business, so they’re done now.
After hitting a brick wall on the day this thread was started (3 days ago), I was able to get in today with no problem, and took care of business – I told them to destroy my sample, and withdrew my agreement to participate in research. Then I deleted my account (I’ll be checking in a day or two to make sure that was effective). I wasn’t interested in downloading my data.
The simple route to getting valuable health information is you ask all of the users of a genetic service to submit a list of all of their health issues, and then you fully sequence the genome of all of the submitted DNA samples, and then you set a computer to look for the correlations. With a large enough data set, you could find all sorts of things.
But do services like 23andme do full sequencing? It’s technically possible, but more expensive than just looking at a short list of specific markers. Unfortunately, looking at a short list of specific markers mostly only gives you answers to the questions you already knew, because you wouldn’t be looking at that marker unless you knew what it meant.