At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it's working to verify the data.
The full picture of why the data was stolen, how much more the attackers have, and whether it is actually focused entirely on Ashkenazim is still unclear.
There’s a whole conspiracy regarding Covid that RFK Jr. is blathering about. Supposedly this data breach targeted Jews and Chinese folks. I’m assuming that it’s related in some way, but it’s not clear how.
As a power fantasy mostly. They might pass it around and use it to jerk each other off but not much more than that. The problem is, it’s only a fantasy until it makes it’s way into the hands of someone with the means and derangement to act on it: two qualities which, depending on where you live, can be unsettlingly easy to come by
It takes so much work to successfully pull off sarcasm in text. I’m still working on it, it’s a craft I hope to master some day. But the fun in it is the ambiguity, so adding a /s takes all the fun out of it. But ideally only a select few get whooshed.
I am a 23andMe user, and yes I voluntarily sent them my DNA sample. Shit on me all you want. You probably don’t have to live with multiple genetic conditions, chronic illnesses, and have a family history of several more.
Must be nice to be privileged with a healthy body and to get to care about privacy concerns instead wondering which genetic condition you’ll die of first.
ITT: People who have never experienced medical gaslighting before. Think about the relevance of your experiences before commenting. ITT: People who don’t live with chronic ille
But… isnt that what doctors are for? Like, the people who have multiple government mandated levels of security around your data? And medical expertise in which genetic conditions you will die of first?
So, you want to blame your local physicians being incompetent for you putting your safety in the hands of less qualified people?
You arent the only victim of medical malpractice. That doesnt make it smart, sane, or even straightforward to trust a knock off elon musk with your health, that means you have to look for a competent doctor.
Is that hard? Is it scary? Yes, obviously. Welcome to the world, where scary shit happens to you for no reason sometimes. But malpractice isnt a reason to put yourself further at risk. As evidenced by the now millions of jewish patients whose safety is now likely at risk.
You don’t seem to understand what a systemic issue is if you think this is because of a few ‘local physicians’ or just one case of ‘malpractice’. If you think this is something that can be resolved from looking for ‘one competent doctor’, you have no idea how impossible it is to find a team of 1 PCP and 5 specialists who all happen to give a shit, and what to do when you need to go to the ER which is another hellhole of it’s own.
You can come back to this discussion when you show some understanding of how extensive this issue is.
I am speaking from a decade of experience trying to have a correct diagnosis. I dont know how to tell you this, but you are not the first person to have a doctor dismiss them.
Thats still not an excuse to put yourself further at risk. You can come back to this discussion when you show some understanding of how vastly serious this data breach is.
Youre acting like there arent medical, protected systems to challenge malpractice. To require tests that doctors wont advise. To force second and third opinions. To rerun studies and checks to prove signifigance over fluke.
I know they exist, I had to use them. Acting like your only options were eat a bullet or sell your genome is a lie.
You’re excuse is such garbage it’s beyond stupid. You’ve got health concerns so you willingly gave up your privacy to a tech company… instead of going through, y’know the medical system which has checks and balances for this purpose.
You’re the people they want to be their victims. Ignorant people driven by fear.
instead of going through, y’know the medical system which has checks and balances for this purpose.
This is the single dumbest take on healthcare I have ever heard. You’ve clearly never had to deal with extensive medical issues or chronic illnesses, or you’re a straight white guy in your 30s and have the privilege of being believed by your doctor.
I’ve been forcefully misdiagnosed with ‘anxiety’ by so many doctors who wouldn’t listen to me. No one gave a shit until I threatened to report them to the medical board. That’s the only time they took my symptoms seriously and bothered to do a blood test, where they were proven wrong. No amount of sorry from them will undo the damage they’ve done.
This was one of 5 incidences where I had to advocate for my own health against the doctor’s preconceptions because theywould rather diagnose me based on my age and gender rather than my symptoms.
Medical gaslighting is a pervasive issue that disproportionately affects women, POC, young people, and LGBTQ. It’s a systemic issue that kills people through medical neglect. I would be dead by now had I not fought this hard for my own diagnoses.
The fact that you think modern health care is some pristine and fully reliable process instead of the shit show it is just speaks of how little you’ve had to deal with. Sit down and check yourself before taking about ignorance.
Read the rest of the comments here before you comment. Everyone is bashing 23andMe users and the bubble they live in while the irony is completely lost on them.
Your so called ‘obvious reasons’ are anything but obviously to the average lemmy user who will find every excuse to feel superior about their niche privacy loving community with no clue how the real world works.
The fact that big companies collect and sell your data is common knowledge now, definitely not something esoteric that only people in privacy-conscious bubbles know of. However, “normal” people refuse to not follow every trend or get inconvenienced.
there’s also this attitude that certain users never did anything wrong. YouSureAboutThat.jpg
They never signed up for anything that compromised their privacy?
Also, we all live in abodes with wooden doors and glass windows that anyone with a rock or a stick can break into. Doesn’t mean we deserve to be murdered in our sleep.
The company said its systems were not breached and that attackers gathered the data by guessing the login credentials of a group of users and then scraping more people’s information from a feature known as DNA Relatives.
The information does not appear to include actual, raw genetic data.
The data that’s available on the hacker forum doesn’t contain the raw DNA, but that’s just a promotion to sell much bigger dataset, which the hackers claim has the DNA… twitter.com/mattjay/status/1710370443968856559
The point I think you could be missing is that the organizations which do this have been at best irresponsible, at worst negligent, in protecting customers personal information. There are obviously benefits to this a genetic record. Preserving a comprehensive genetic record for future generations to study is one. A database for law enforcement to use to solve very serious crimes like murder and rape. All that would be wonderful, but that information is already being misused and abused. Most people, myself included, don’t think these organizations will ever be responsible to their customers cause who the hell would believe that these days?
I’d love to know all of that. I just don’t ever trust a private corporation to safeguard my highly personal and unique DNA information from:
a foreign scammer looking to make a buck
my government looking to close a case
a foreign government looking for kompromat
a health care company looking for reasons to deny coverage.
It’s too easy for a company to skimp on staff and digital security and then say “we’re soooo sowwwy, have 3 months of identity fraud protection on us” if they find a breach.
Though if neither a father nor his sons have submitted their DNA, the service will lack all that Y-DNA though, right? I’m glad I made the right decision to not send in my DNA to those sites, despite my sisters hounding me to do it after our dad refused, lol.
It’s a shame though, because family genetic networking is interesting, but it just goes to show you can’t trust these companies. (Even though the company didn’t really do anything truly wrong in this case, as it’s simply users reusing passwords, they still should have been better/more proactive especially with such sensitive information)
It’s not really like they are storing DNA sequences anyways. They use a genotyping array which just reads ~650k single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
An analogy would be 23andme has a 6.4mil page book of DNA for a single customer but they only know the position and letter of single character on every tenth page. Sure it’s enough to identify someone (You can confidently use 50 SNPs to identify these days) but it’s not like 23andme was ever storing a whole genome
Even though the company didn’t really do anything truly wrong in this case, as it’s simply users reusing passwords, they still should have been better/more proactive especially with such sensitive information
There’s nothing special or new or unique or unforseen about the security requirements of 23andMe.
They absolutely failed to implement an appropriate level of security measures for their service.
I mean, too bad. You’re accessing the results of your genetic data that contain sensitive personal information on relatives as well as yourself. Banks require 2FA, and people figure out how to use that.
Y chromosomes have very little information on them, and the DNA there is pretty highly conserved. You’re not really keeping any secrets by hiding your Y chromosome away.
ETA because I don't engage with bigots:
Imagine that, the descendants of one of the biggest genocides in history want to try and piece their history together, and use the available tools to do it with, fucking shocker..
Then, when they continue getting targeted just for existing, privileged ignorant bigots who couldn't even imagine what having over 90% of their community gassed is like, and have never been oppressed for who they are a day in their lives, simply can't help themselves but jump to justify them being attacked again:
tHe bAstArDs dEseRve eVerYthInG tHey GeT!!11
And somehow not a word about the attackers, nor the company that failed its customers.
E. g. if somebody loses money in a multilevel marketing scheme, is it wrong to blame the victim? Or is not every victim a victim?
Regarding your edit, that’s assuming a bit too much to defend your point.
But that’s what I asked for, your reason why there is no responsibility on the side of the victims.
To engage with that line of thinking: if you leave agency at people, you can ask why one would trust a company with that data when every conspiracy theorist doesn’t use that service specifically because of the risk of genocide.
But you are right, there are valid reasons to take the risk.
It’s always wrong to blame the victim, yes. You just genuinely don’t believe they actually are victims, and if you want to have that debate, be honest and have it. But you don’t get to recognize their victimhood and then invalidate it by implying their suffering is partly their fault.
Is this a choice of words issue? Saying that somebody could have prevented something and with that knowledge should prevent it next time doesn’t change victimhood for me. The suffering of the victim remains.
What is lost if the victim had some agency? Is there some metaphysical aspect to it? Are victims prechosen by fate and it’s a sacrilege to question their fate?
I can agree that a zebra being killed by lions shouldn’t be blamed. But a person who ignores advice from friends and joines a multilevel marketing scheme is not entirely innocent.
Because attributing any blame to a victim is always a sleazy attempt to shift all responsibility for a situation away from the aggressor and onto the victim. It’s a common abuse tactic.
Plus, most people really aren’t capable of doing what they need to do in life-threatening or abusive situations. Adults really don’t have as much agency as they like to pretend they do, and I personally am tired of being dishonest about it.
I say that as one of the people who has been abused partly through their own failings and iniquities. I don’t call myself a victim. I’m also not an average representative of people in abusive situations – I have always been and always was capable of doing far more than most other people, and so I am telling you from that experience that you cannot attribute any responsibility for a situation on a victim like that. Most people are just NPCs and you need to respect that.
I agree with your intentions. The integrity of a victim mustn’t be questioned. The issue to me is that it is not logical that attributing any blame does shift all responsibility. If that is the case then the victim is still in an abusive situation and priorities shouldn’t lie on the usage of language.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I hope that you are in a safe environment. I am overextending my position a bit and claim that despite your experience we shouldn’t accept limited agency in humans. For one, I have just been arguing that democracy relies on it. Apart from that, the aggressors can also claim limited agency. To me, that is not acceptable. Agency is a lie that we accept for the law to work. There are no aliens who take care of us. We have to make do with what we have.
That said, I am of course open to concepts about how to structure society with limited agency.
I don’t really disagree with you, I’m just informing you of the reality of the situation. I just read on the World News reel here that 54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level – that alone shows us that Americans at least really don’t have any agency and I assert this is part of the reason why abuse and exploitation from all sides is so goddamn rampant here.
Stopping abuse is a fight that will have to be done through multiple methods, but the only way to do that is to restore our agency as a people, and the only way we can do that is by first recognizing that most of us really don’t have it.
It’s up to us who are educated and who therefore do have agency to lift the others up. We need to make government force people to be educated – offer free remedial classes at community colleges, enforce a high-school level reading standard and if you can’t meet that, you legally can’t be gainfully employed. Anonymize testing and tie results to social security numbers. It can be done.
I was all with you until the forced education. Nothing kills curiosity faster. We can do better. There are enough humans that not everybody has to read, especially in a world of phones and videos.
The important part is respect. Children need an environment that nurtures it so that they are respectful as adults. A bit like ‘do not abuse a child and it won’t become an abusive adult.’
But yes, we don’t have full agency. That’s where development is needed.
Nah dude, literally everyone does have to be able to read. You can’t do anything in life unless you can read, especially using the internet, and abusers specifically use the inability to read to exploit victims financially – if you can’t read, you can’t sign contracts or consent to anything, you can’t learn anything (and no, videos are not enough; most of the things they teach you require reading) and you can’t effectively communicate with anybody who isn’t directly in front of you.
I agree with you about the respect part. Respect is BADLY needed and the lack of it is part of the root cause of the collapse of the education system. People just don’t think education or learning is needed, and I think deep down inside you suspect as much, which is why you were talking about victim agency.
“I can’t believe this incredibly obvious thing happened!” Isn’t really victim blaming, is it? They’re not saying they did it to themselves or they deserved it, they’re saying that this was bound to happen and people volunteered their DNA to a private company
Why even have a capitalist economy if private businesses can just abuse people like that and the customer is routinely blamed for participating in the economy the only way they’re allowed to?
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