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Company involved in a data breach try not to blame customers challenge (impossible)
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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That headline sounds to me like them claiming "Y'all're a bunch of eejits for usin' our service!"
To which I'd say "Yeah sure, I'm certain that would hold up in court" with the biggest eye roll you could imagine
23andMe
I never met a Geneticist who couldn't immediately recognize this company as a scam. The product wasn't the papers they send you after doing random marker tests once (so, false positives exist, and they never cared). The product is the DNA they collected by convincing people that their test was even remotely useful or insightful.
Its entirely based on correlation; and correlation to what? Geographic area? That makes no sense if you know one of any number of fields and many don't even have to be scientific in nature, or genetics.
I have always hated them, always told people to never use them and get themselves a proper 50x full genome sequencing since it costed the same; and actually provides real, resolute and reliable data. Not just like borderline pseudoscience. Might as well sent in the shape of your skull.
I knew better than to give thee companies my DNA but of course I've had family give it to them. I suppose if I was wanted for an unsolved murder I'd be a bit concerned, but I'm still not happy that anyone's DNA is compromised that I'm associated with.
The question to me is what's the play with that data. I'd assume they would have a use for it if they went to the trouble of stealing it. I suspect in the future this will be lucrative data, but what's the play right now??
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In a way, it kind of is their fault for trusting companies like this in the first place. I'd never consider using companies like this and both think and hope none of my family members would either.
Obviously, the breach is the company being incompetent like many companies are when it comes to security.
Unfortunately like you said, family members can do so of their own accord which is exactly what one of mine did, despite my warnings of such.
It's completely impossible for me to "un-ring" that bell now, so to speak.
From the article:
The data breach started with hackers accessing only around 14,000 user accounts. The hackers broke into this first set of victims by brute-forcing accounts with passwords that were known to be associated with the targeted customers, a technique known as credential stuffing.
From these 14,000 initial victims, however, the hackers were able to then access the personal data of the other 6.9 million million victims because they had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature. This optional feature allows customers to automatically share some of their data with people who are considered their relatives on the platform.
This video comes to mind. https://youtu.be/ESzxGYDkwG8?feature=shared
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