23andMe will pay $30 million to settle 2023 data breach lawsuit (oh and the whole board quit)

[Mark]

23andme will be paying out 30mil to settle the data breach.

https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/ ... 58702.html


https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 024-09-17/

Unrelated, but the whole board also quit over a plan to take it private and made the CEO sad or something

Anyone else have family who are insisting on using genealogy and DNA testing services and practically shoving it down your throat, or is that just me?

[rejectconvenience]

Dang, given the information that was breached, $30 million feels like a drop in the bucket.

I hope my family knows better, none of them have bugged me about it, but you never know!

[Mark]

Dang, given the information that was breached, $30 million feels like a drop in the bucket.

I hope my family knows better, none of them have bugged me about it, but you never know!

Unfortunately that's not the case for mine. My mother is weirdly more privacy oriented than I am on some things (hated the idea of backing up to the cloud for photos and such - that is until her external storage drive failed, and until she realized she would just never offload photos from her phone, risking them all). But on 23andMe and other genealogy services, she's all more willing because of the trade-off of accessing that compiled data and submissions from likely distant relatives. The worst part though, is that they can supply YOUR name, picture, and information, so your name just gets hucked up there as part of the data set, and this is seen as "fine" by people uploading.

[MikeGs]

I'll never understand how anyone thought that attaching their full name to their DNA sequence on a random privately owned database was a good idea.

[CitricScion]

That's the thing about biological data - you can't change that. Once it's leaked, that's it. People will have access to those details about you. It's an unintended consequence that people don't think about - even I was excited at one point to participate in one of these services. It was only after I understood that this data is not impervious to leaks that I had to stop myself. There's an unopened box for Ancestry somewhere around here.

It's the same reason I don't like biometrics for unlocking devices. You can change a password. You can't change your thumbprint.

[rejectconvenience]

You can change a password. You can't change your thumbprint.

I like this.

[Mark]

You can change a password. You can't change your thumbprint.

Not with that attitude