HN user
"They don't link the study, so it is hard to tell."
The study: "Identifying personal genomes by surname inference." Gymrek et al. Science. 2013 Jan 18. (http://www.jhu.edu/pfleming/bioinform/files/gymrek_science_2...)
"...once you do this test, you are legally obligated for revealing results to the insurance company you plan to be insured with."
Got a citation for that?
If that's true, then getting a 23andme test could mean price gouging for anyone looking for life insurance, disability insurance or long-term-care insurance. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...) prohibits employers and health insurance companies from genetic discrimination, but there's a big loophole for other types of insurers to. More information: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/01/17/169634045/some-ty....
And you thought Zuckerberg was bad.
The cavalier attitude towards privacy that pervades the field of genomics is deeply troubling to me. From the article: "23andMe's privacy statement clearly states that it collects a person's genetic, registration, web browsing, and self-reported information. The company can share its data with third parties '[after] it has been stripped of Registration Information and combined with data from a number of other users sufficient to minimize the possibility of exposing individual-level information while still providing scientific evidence.'"
Having read that, consider that "a team of geneticists reported Thursday in the journal Science that it was able to figure out the names of people who had donated their DNA to research -- even though test subjects' identities were stripped from their genomic data." (Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/18/science/la-sci-sn-ge...)
Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andme, is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. It doesn't seem entirely implausible that the two companies could have joint business ventures down the road. I wonder how valuable "anonymized" genomic sequences would be to advertisers.