this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it's working to verify the data.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 9 months ago (24 children)

I can't believe people voluntarily sent them their DNA.

[–] batmangrundies 76 points 9 months ago (9 children)

The worst part is it you have enough family members who used these services your details are likely on there too.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (8 children)

Though if neither a father nor his sons have submitted their DNA, the service will lack all that Y-DNA though, right? I'm glad I made the right decision to not send in my DNA to those sites, despite my sisters hounding me to do it after our dad refused, lol.

It's a shame though, because family genetic networking is interesting, but it just goes to show you can't trust these companies. (Even though the company didn't really do anything truly wrong in this case, as it's simply users reusing passwords, they still should have been better/more proactive especially with such sensitive information)

[–] GentriFriedRice 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's not really like they are storing DNA sequences anyways. They use a genotyping array which just reads ~650k single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

An analogy would be 23andme has a 6.4mil page book of DNA for a single customer but they only know the position and letter of single character on every tenth page. Sure it's enough to identify someone (You can confidently use 50 SNPs to identify these days) but it's not like 23andme was ever storing a whole genome

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