this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
433 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
55562 readers
4066 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I never understood the appeal of the business in the first place. Why would you care who your great great great grandpa was? I don't even care who my Grandpa was.
It's commonly used by Adoptees to find their biological family. This can be important for a few reasons, including finally getting accurate family health history.
i had a coworker from my last job find his birth mother through one of these dna websites. the happiness he had on his face when he came back after finally meeting his biological family made me think about 1) how fortunate I am and 2) how many people have used these services to connect to long lost family members.
the good outweighs the bad for now, imo.
No question. It took me 6 years and thousands of hours to find mine (distant matches only, and birth father was dead, and birth mother was also adopted, which added an extra 2 years to the search). If it wasn't for DNA I would never have located her though.
I was able to find out that my great grandfather was adopted, and meet a whole new wing of my family. I didn't even do the test, my aunt did.
About 10 years ago they provided medical data from the samples. I used 23 And Me too confirm that a health problem I'd recently been diagnosed with was hereditary. At the time I remember being asked if my sample could be used to aid the type of research the OP talks about and I agreed to it.
A couple of years ago, I think 23 And Me was bought out by Virgin Healthcare, at that point I asked them to destroy all my data was worried about it being used to increase the cost of or preclude health insurance.