7 years ago, I tried to warn people about DNA ancestry companies. Now, with 23andMe going bankrupt, the worst is coming true.

I posted this 7 years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7g5kiy/are_you_a_fool_why_are_you_voluntarily_giving/

To me, it made no sense that people were giving their very sacred identity to a company AND paying them for at best, an educated guess at your ancestry. The results from these companies were in no way definitive. They were just guesses from database of gene pools. Yet, millions of people signed up. Anne Wojcicki (now CEO of YouTube), who was married to Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, invested heavily in 23andMe and took on the role of CEO of the company. To me, a consumer DNA database plus Google sounded like a nightmare scenario. The most powerful data company in the world would acquire genetic data of millions of people.

The battle for 23andMe's DNA customer data

Now that 23andMe is bankrupt there is a mad rush to buy the DNA data from the company. But, here's reality. All that data has already been sold, multiple times over. It is being used by the govt, the insurance sector, pharmaceutical sector, data brokers, big data companies, and various other industries to make money. And while some good has come out of it, like catching the Golden State killer in 2018 (a distant relative had uploaded the results of 23andMe to a public database called GEDMatch) in most cases, the data was and will be used for nefarious purposes.

But all is not lost. You can still request your DNA records be erased by contacting 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Do so immediately if you've ever used any of these companies' services.