I’d pull that scam. Come on.
That’s why you need a Facebook profile. Then what you do is thrown in alleged direct descendancy from Cleopatra or Louis XVI and whatnot.
23andMe has been purchased by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. According news reports Regeneron intends to respect 23andMe privacy requirements, and intends to keep on all 23andMe employees.
Regeneron does use genetic information for drug discovery, so I expect that is their motivation.
Disclaimer: I have had beers that Regeneron paid for.
I’m hopeful that means they’ll actually do something with all that data and make some pioneering genetic treatments.
Though it’s too bad it’s not all just going into some public domain database wiped of personal information. And I guess even then, it’d be too easy to cross-reference that with other data and de-anonymize people that way.
Oh well. Better a drug company than a data broker, at least.
It’s my understanding that drug researchers do anonymize the data they work with, not only from such a genetic database as this but also from patients enrolled in Stage 2 and 3 trials. Research results that get published in the literature or presented to the FDA for drug approval will describe how the data underpinning the results were gathered and tested for statistical validity as a whole but not get into identifiable weeds.
Is there any, and what is the law, on police using familial DNA matching (re: season ending Law and order episode, but still a valid question)? I did some reading, and the best I can find is “it depends”.