Asklemmy

44149 readers

1353 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Are any of the DNA testing companies trustworthy? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by Snapz to c/[email protected]

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] habanhero 4 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 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

[–] habanhero 1 points 1 year ago

Great point