this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Are any of the DNA testing companies trustworthy? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by Snapz@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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So obviously we're all on Lemmy for a complicated combination of reasons, but we all likely share some common ground, namely...

  • need for privacy
  • need to own/control/access the data we produce
  • healthy skepticism about the trustworthiness of for-profit corporations, in general

So if we don't want meta to know even innocuous things; like how many times/when we message our grandma, and we don't google to know when we're searching for remedies to a rash, and we don't want reddit to... Well we just don't want reddit - we don't want them to profit from or weaponize that data against us in a myriad ways.

We also don't want them artificially removing features and creating tiered layers of service/value hidden behind a paywall (I understand this is very present in the some of the commercially available DNA services).

So that brings me to DNA testing services. Since they started to emerge in the mainstream they were immediately an interesting, exciting novelty and I also knew it was data I wouldn't feel safe trusting with a for-profit org - with broken systems like law enforcement and health insurers on speed dial and just salivating for the goodies they collect.

So all that considered, any groups that provide this type of service that you do trust/use, and why?

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[โ€“] habanhero@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

None. As long as it's "commercially available", their interest is no longer aligned with yours.

Also, unless you are running your own Lemmy instance, I question your assumptions that using Lemmy is actually an upgrade to privacy and data ownership. I heard this point a lot and I don't see the basis for this. Can you explain?

[โ€“] peter 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A small lemmy instance = a small dataset = less desirable to advertisers = less valuable for the owner of the instance to attempt to sell

[โ€“] habanhero@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which is kind of my point. Even on Lemmy the "data ownership" isn't really up to the individual users, it's the instance owners. The only way to 100% control where your data goes (as an user) and who looks at it, is if you run your own instance. Otherwise you are still at the mercy of another master, hopefully a more benevolent one.

And if the instance that most new users default to is lemmy.world and that instance is 100K users strong, I think the "smaller instance" argument doesn't really apply there for most users.

[โ€“] peter 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even if you run your own instance, if you're federated with other instances then your posts, comments and upvotes could still be scraped by someone else