The board of directors of 23andMe just resigned in protest. The CEO, Anne Wojcicki (who's sister Susan died of lung cancer last month, and was the former CEO of YouTube) had tried to low ball take the company private at only $0.40 a share -- a more than 96% drop from its deSPAC price.

For reference, right now the market cap of 23andMe is $172 million, its closest competitor Ancestry.com was bought out by the Blackstone group for $4.7 billion, and cumulative sales of KeyTruda - an anti-cancer drug in the same family as the one being developed by 23andMe had cumulative sales of $25 billion by 2023.

Feels like the main thing holding this company back is the CEO and lack of corporate governance (due to majority shareholder control resting in the hands of one person)

Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the initial $99 from the customer, most of the value customer is going to get is already served up in the first report. Maybe their big database will turn into making cancer drugs but maybe it wont.

The routine emails I get about them allegedly finding new DNA relatives suggest otherwise. The DNA relatives feature is also still pretty prominent in their UI (at least on desktop browsers; haven't looked at the app yet).

That said, it certainly doesn't offer much beyond "these are your relatives; send 'em some messages or something lol". Ancestry probably has a lot more features on that front, which is unsurprising since that's the sort of thing Ancestry was doing long before they even offered DNA sequencing kits like 23andMe does. I don't know if I'd characterize that as 23andMe "giving up", though; more that it's good enough for a product that never intended to enter the genealogy software market in the first place.

I get/got spammed by them about new relatives on the order of "6th cousin who shares 0.3% of your DNA." Thanks, but who cares...

Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the spam folder with you".

Concrete example: My grandmother was born in Brooklyn. As it turns out, her half-brother lived a few blocks away. At the time my grandmother was born, he was 9 and living with his grandparents despite the fact his father lived nearby.

I still don't know why, but when I found out he even existed - something I didn't know until long after my grandmother died -, I also soon found his daughter was alive and well in New Jersey, and was able to get in touch. I now have pictures, and stories to fill in not just his background, but thanks to that connection I now have pictures of the graves of my great-great-grandfather, and several of his children, and stories about my grandmothers uncles, and aunts she never mentioned while she was alive.

I also have pictures of my great-grandfather - my mums grandfather - that I hadn't seen before.

Of course, that is reasonably close, but sometimes those things end up passed down one side of a family, with no copies existing, and you can increasingly find relatives far away from you in the tree who has photos of shared ancestors, and that proportion will increase dramatically with each new generation.

So every time I find a match, however remote, with an active account, you better believe I'll message them. Not because I care that we're related, but because I care about whether or not they can fill in some bit or other in my ancestry. For me, anyway, it's a fun puzzle more than anything else, when you go beyond the immediate family.

Like why is that one ancestor showing up as a widow one moment, and someone with the same name as her husband showing up as married to her sister in the next census with an implausible country of origin? Can I find evidence to corroborate theories? Can I find that notorious "hat maker from Bremen" that almost certainly didn't exist but was cover for infidelity, or evidence that he didn't exist (I almost certainly can't) - it'd be funny, because an entire arm of the family took on the supposed, probably invented, last name of the hypothetical hat maker because an ancestor of theirs thought it sounded posh.

The "long-lost second cousins" are just bit players in that game.

Now there are probably some who think genealogy is a silly pastime and maybe it is, but researching my family history helps me feel grounded and more connected to humanity so I derive a lot of benefit from it.

For "close" relatives, I agree there can also be more to it.

E.g. my mums mum never told us that much about her family (we never asked while she was around), and my mum didn't know either, and so uncovering more about that was very fascinating (it helped that there was plenty of drama to uncover) and helped fill in a lot of gaps.

Interest in family trees predates Ancestry.com and will certainly outlast it. It’s not necessarily about contact. I’m not sure what’s controversial here.

That data is hard fought and won by a relative who conducts meticulous research as a hobby. They've been at it for a good 20 odd years now.

My daughter has been interested for years in delving into our different familial trees and has extensive records on paper and in various digital formats. She isn’t overly technical but could be taught to use a web interface if she’d gain value from the effort.

Especially familysearch allows private profiles, no need to share. Wikitree has a policy of "do not add living people", but it is possible to do and Ive done it for close family.

Yes, this means sharing fairly freely, but I do not see a reason not to. Unless you want a fantasy tree, sharing your tree will make it higher quality. We all make mistakes here and there.

Wikitree especially requires you add sources to your work, which might feel odd for a personal tree of course.

My relative uses The Master Genealogist (TMG) which is no longer developed. We are both Linux users and he uses Wine bottles to keep it alive. I will probably end up hosting a Win XP VM for it.

Geneweb is seeing renewed development and is really fast. The plan is to migrate to Geneweb. The fields that TMG has that GEDCOM can't handle are turned into NOTES which is probably good enough.

You do not have to get to grips with OCAML to run it. The Github releases shield you from that. It is a bit idiosyncratic but it does work!

Genealogy is a very deep and complicated subject with as many opinions as there are practitioners. You could try both Webtrees and Geneweb and use GEDCOM to act as an intermediary data format until you decide which to use full time. Do make sure you listen to her. She may potentially have some "odd" ideas about data that may not have occurred to you. Be warned - genealogists are a breed apart and any reasonably serious one has damn good reasons for that! There are also quite a few reasons for becoming a genealogist as well as methods used.

There are tons of websites for different last names in the United States, showing history of the name. Many times the last name be traced back to a singular person, which I find especially cool since you have sprawling families all connected by one guy who made the journey over. Obviously last names like Smith won't be like this, but if you have a unique last name it can actually be quite common that one person coming to the new world connects you and everybody else in the Americas together. I find that super cool to think about and I am glad people are doing the effort to research and find this info out.

In cases where the user is trying to find their parent, it’s statistically unlikely that their parent would have taken the test, but 2nd cousin matches are very common. These seem like a huge distance away, but you can work backwards and build a family tree up to their great grandparents and fan out from there.

Prostitution in the Philippines is illegal so any explicit or implicit contract would be void anyway. Not to mention that consent is questionable anyway when most of these women are either trafficked or forced by economic hardship to partake in it.

She would not pursue out of respect to her adopted mother. Outside of this I would be in the same boat as you.

I think she is unhappy that our family line will likely end with me. (only child, who is almost a 40 year old virgin)

If you don't get to see the future you want, consume your time with the past.

But Ancestry is a roach motel. Of all sites that sell user-contributed data back to their users, and they're all scummy, I don't know any which are more scummy than Ancestry and MyHeritage.

There is so much more power in 23andMe's Raw Data regarding health than people realize and I am capitalizing on it. (Less with the v5 chip but it is still really good,)

Finding drugs with 23andMe is a waste of time and is not wehre they should be focusing on making money. They should be focusing on personalized medicine.

I think it's inherently human to want to understand who we are and where come from. Especially for someone like me in the USA. How did my people end up here?

I have a family member who is retired and has taken up geneology as a hobby, she has connected our family history really far back. Not my cup of tea personally but I can see the appeal, its like a treasure hunt. She has traveled to go to old libraries and dig up newspaper archives.

I think as a country of immigrants—or colonizers—we all feel desperate for some sense of personal history and identity.

Any idea where I might find a list of Russian navy officers from then or the following decades?

Is there any reason to think the company is worth $4.7B or whatever ($9.30/share)? If so the stock is a steal at its current price and we should all buy lots. But can the market be THAT wrong?

That doesn't mean the market is wrong, it means the market thinks it will continue to be run ineffectively.

The controlling interest can just hire incompetent ops heads and side-line competent ones for a few quarters ... slowwalk any events that could increase value

The board resigning likely helps the plan

Fair chance future offers will get worse the longer it goes on

It seems like there are contradictory facts being claimed: that the price to go private is a lowball, and that the current price is accurate.

Honestly that's borderline fraud.

They have been (miss)managing the company about the same for 18 years, so it would have to be one of the most epic cons of all time.

On the other hand, partial owners and management take companies private all the time. It is an extremely common occurrence. It and PE buyout are probably the two most common ways.

Anne Wojicki is already sufficiently wealthy – net worth $150m+? – that maybe what really interests her is playing hardball for (say) $10B+ instead of just a few hundred million more? Or for the control & glory of shepherding forward some breakthrough cancer treatments that the other investors might simply treat as financial options to sell early?

And, perhaps she's got the votes & de facto IP control & legal budget to think she's got a good chance of winning, and even a loss can't cut her out?

Isn't this just bare-knuckle "founder mode"?

If they were to reorganize first and produce a company worth as much as its competitors, they only get eg 5% of eg 30B, which after taxes makes them maybe a billionaire. Reorg and do the same thing and they could be looking at control and $10-20B.

Where tens of billions of dollars are involved, “really complicated” and “high risk” plays are basically table stakes.

> Because of that difference and because of your concentrated voting power, we believe that it is in the best interests of the Company’s shareholders that we resign

EDIT: But that brings up a different question: If you have majority voting power, why try to take the company private (as it has been suggested by others here)?

1. Less legal oversight and paperwork.

2. I don’t know the terms of the buyout, but if this means the CEO, family, friends, etc (“insiders”) become the new shareholders, then any future upside will be distributed to insiders not the open market.

This is similar to what zuckerberg is doing with Meta. Supervoting Class A shares vs common shares, etc.

The arrangement is completely up to the governing docs of the entity.

Also the question of "what powers does the board even have then?"

I don't know their governance structure, but the CEO may have a majority of votes, but not own a majority of the actual shares. Being able to take the company private would give her (and her other investors) full economic control as well as voting control.

This is risky ground, of course. Even with voting control, legally the CEO cannot screw over the minority shareholders.

voting power dictates control. Ownership dictates rights to profits. you can have full control with 51% ownership, but you still only get 51% of profits.

Yes. Historic examples abound of the market being that wrong. People can and have made fortunes by finding those opportunities.

Which is different from is the market that wrong in this case?

Shortsqueezes are cases of driving prices up because shares are hard to get and shorts need to cover. Again, not related to the best offer being too low.

Secrets are also dumb examples because that’s hidden information.

What we’re talking about here is the valuation with all of the public information available now. Nobody of any relevant market size seems to agree that it should be $9/share.

If one is willing to grant that the stock "price" for a liquid listing, is the price for a stock at any given time, then you could argue the markets are "wrong" insofar that the price quoted in the open market, is absolutely not the correct price - regardless of the excuse of a short squeeze.

This is absolutely not true of a price that’s “too low”. Anyone, including you, can go hit those asking prices and start to load up. There is also capped downsize risk (as opposed to uncontrolled risk in a short).

This is all to say that it’s possible that company could be worth $9-10/share, but based on all of the information publicly available today, there are effectively tens of thousands of people each swinging billions in capital than are parking it in stuff providing 5% return rather than the 20000% you suggest is there.

So this tells me that you are just much more hopeful for the future of the company than the current financial projections and prospects support.

Even considering all FDA limitations, I cannot understand how bad their genetic risk scores are.

They have talent, they have lots of customers and data. This is a position other companies, like deCODE, would have killed to be in.

It's quite possible there was no plan at all...

Their business plan was straight out of South Park:

1. Collect lots of DNA

2. ??????

3. Profit!!

This is complicated. The don't just zip up all the customer data and send it over, at least they say that they run aggregated queries for GSK and just tell them the answer. But then they say that the data is "anonymized" before this, which seems unnecessary and impossible.

Imho it's very difficult to anonymize any data, and especially something like DNA. Without an external audit amd some mathematical guarantee (e.g. differntial privacy) I work on the assumption that they do the bare minimum to pass legal muster but anyone who made the effort could confidently associate the data with real people after the fact.

(sorry, it takes a while to load but wired has killed most of their long-term links)

IMHO she and Avey were just naive about the actual science and business of using genomic information for drug discovery. Remember, around the time the company started, the human genome had only recently been sequenced and Craig Venter was trying to capitalize on that, and lots of folks figured it would quickly turn into a multi-billion dollar market.

On the other hand, the product is quite good at finding relatives (identity by descent) and to be honest I wish they'd run 23&me as just that service, without the medical angle. My father did 23&Me mainly to figure out more about his ancestry, but also it helped a number of children conceived via IVF (he had provided a sample for fertility testing many years before) identify and contact him (I can't even imagine what the experience was like; to me, it's just a bunch of half-siblings I didn't know about)

Wait, so a sample he submitted for fertility testing was used to impregnate a number of women? Without his knowledge?

To be fair, a lot of the potential easy money in that market was erased two years after 23andMe was founded when Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

- lying about growth

- pushing out the cofounder

- never making a profit

- hack that went undiscovered for months

About the only area she's had success is raising money and that's in large part thanks to being a member of the Silicon Valley elite.

This can be modeled with a binomial distribution as 1-probability of both failing. That comes out to 1-(.7^2) which is 51% of at least one drug reaching phase 3.

There is literally a coin flip chance the company will reach the stage where there is another coin flip it will be worth billions (I believe ~50% of phase 3 drugs go to market), but thanks to the messaging of the CEO, right now it seems like there is a near 0% chance investors (which include former company employees) would benefit from this.

And given that 23andme currently has a market cap 1/20th DJT (Trump Media & Technology Group Corp) -- a firm that makes less revenue than a variety store yet has huge losses -- I wouldn't really say it's "worth so much".

The companies actual revenue has zero impact and never will. Treat DJT like a NFT and it makes a ton of sense.

You’re right for the wrong reasons. (EDIT: I'm wrong for no reason.)

Dow Jones is obsolete [1]. Its value is in its brand, i.e. other people look at it.

The other factors you mention are noise. Relevant to a trader or market maker with infintessimal time horizons. But irrelevant to an investor thinking even in months. The American markets are simply too deep. The totality of dollars at work by MAGA voters, game-playing hedge funds and money launderers--through the stock market--is negligible. (Lots of political tea-leave reading funds have been attempted. Zero prevail.)

[1] https://retirementresearcher.com/why-the-dow-doesnt-work/

I can't believe how people can be naive over and over.

selling the smallest amount of share possible for the highest amount you can get can easily balloon the "paper" value of a company, but that money doesn't really exist anywhere.

it will change when things go public, but often the initial price is based on some vapourous guess like this...

I have always felt as if 23andMe was just her pet lil project and it doesn't matter if its ever profitable or not.

Use has also dropped, no? There's serious questions about long term revenue generation. Ancestry.com doesn't require selling your genetic code to collaborate on geneology.

A lot of Ancestry.com and AncestryDNA was founded to support the Mormon belief that the LDS church can posthumously baptize ancestors of living individuals into the church under the belief that many deceased individuals were not alive to hear the gospel of Joseph Smith.

Thus the massive data collection effort for historical information like newpaper articles from this century and the last.

I hereby grant permission for my name to be invoked in all rituals, sacred and profane, by all current and future living persons. And I'll laugh at you in advance.

Despite the promising drug development news, the CEO signaled last month that she was willing to let public investors get hosed, with a low ball take-private offer of $0.40/share. I believe this pissed both public investors and the board members off. I'm not sure if the positive phase 2 results were icing on the cake.

Quite honestly this company is a ripe target for acquisition by a biopharma company like GSK or Roche.

I think we are disappointed that the market is giving $ME and many other companies non-ZIRP valuations at 95% discounts, and we don't have the cash to buy them at the bottom, like she can.

But having working science does not make a successful business plan.

Google was founded in the garage of Anne and Susan's childhood home. Anne was married to Sergei until he had an affair.

One of the board members of 23andMe is Neal Mohan who is the current CEO of YouTube.

So the issue is not tying it to your online identity, but rather them keeping a resource which becomes more valuable as the time goes on. So why is that an issue... most obviously because of genetic predisposition. There is always a temptation to sell diseases you are predisposed to insurers (and maybe employers... ugh). After that you can imagine someone figuring that genetics affects any number of things (sugar / weight / addiction) and sell that to advertisers...

The film Gattaca covers how this could lead to a sort of night are society pretty well, I highly recommend it.

It also makes it much much harder to use the data for clinical research.

Human brains when generating 'random' numbers: https://xkcd.com/221/

> Once a month company publishes one giant zip with all the monthly result where you find your file by that random number you wrote.

Given how much of our appearance is due to genetics, that's basically all the harm with none of the convenience.

Fortunately, contemporary humans have access to computers, which can generate random numbers for them free of charge.

>Given how much of our appearance is due to genetics, that's basically all the harm

I can't fathom your concept of "harm"; and neither, I think, would any prospective customer of this service.

I'm fairly relaxed about my medical history, but it's really obvious to me that I'm weird in being relaxed.

Despite my relaxed attitude, it's still fairly obvious that this lists every genetic condition*, which in turn obviously going to be relevant to any health insurance provider that isn't banned from using it.

Monetary damages are one of the easiest ones to quantify, from what I hear.

* even those that have not yet had the relevant genes discovered, because statistical methods need a larger population

At this point we practically have a single search engine that’ll take you genetic sequence aa input and return your face, you entire family tree, your current job and address and what you do in your free time.

Frankly I find this lack of accountability utterly repulsive. Anything this leadership touches is poison to me

> Through a mechanism called acceptance by silence or inaction, 23andMe stipulated that customers must explicitly tell the company they disagree with the new terms within 30 days of being notified of the changes or they will be locked into the terms automatically.

> After the attack, hackers published around 1 million data points about users with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and information about more than 300,000 users with Chinese heritage.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/07/23andme-terms-of-service-up...

I want to get my genetic data, but, like obviously I don't want to go through one of these services where they ingest all that data and keep it around forever. Honestly, I'd like to be the only person with access to it and I can destroy it at will.

Tough requirements, I know.

Anyways, do you know of any services that meet those reqs? Any good DIY ideas?

Again, thanks for the AMA

If you use 23andMe, and request data deletion, they will do a best effort to delete the data. It's part of their GDPR requirement. When I was there, I worked on this project and they put a lot of effort into it. A big chunk of engineering org focused GDPR compliance for a month or two. They definitely don't intentionally keep data around if you request deletion.

The one caveat is that data deletion is hard, and its possible that some gets accidentally retained. I left the company over 5 years ago, so I don't know how good their deletion process is now.

One final note: to keep costs low, 23andMe doesn't look at your whole genome. They only look at a handful of "SNPs" in your genome that are known to be significant. If you've heard how we share 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, this is what they're basing this on. They look at the <0.5% of DNA that commonly varies between humans.

The reason I mention this is that, if you're very interested in your DNA sequencing, you may want to opt for a higher cost service that does full genome analysis. I don't know any names but I believe there are some DNA services that do this.

Message I received by email:

> 23andMe and the contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with legal obligations, pursuant to the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 and California laboratory regulations.

> 23andMe will retain limited information related to your deletion request, such as your email address and Account Deletion Request Identifier, as necessary to fulfill your request, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, and as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law.

However they sold access to the data to a bug pharma company (GSK). This was widely publicized. Not sure if that counts: GSK had some ability to look at the data but didn’t have an on premise copy of it.

Also, I worked on the GDPR deletion project. I can attest that they do best effort to delete your data when your request that. At least when I was there, this was the case. One caveat is for coding errors, oversights and bugs.

What 23andMe was selling to GSK was the results of GWAS (Genome Wide Association Study) results, which could be used to generate therapeutic candidates.

GWAS is a sort of rudimentary machine learning algorithm that basically maps a phenotype (like propensity for a particular disease) to a region of DNA. From there the drug company can narrow down candidate genes to attempt to develop specific drugs for.

When I was there, people were pretty confident in this bet. They had just signed a huge deal with GSK, so it seemed to be going well. There wasn't widespread dissent at the time (~2016-2017). I imagine its different now that the stock price has crashed over 10x.

The company did follow Ancestry.com pretty closely. Ancestry did not bet heavily on genomics. Instead, they bet heavily on a subscription model and focused more on consumer interest in their ancestors. This has worked out a lot better for them than 23andMe.

FWIW, I agree it's obvious in retrospect that pharma was a bad bet. Leadership should have made better decisions.

Many people sold during internal private liquidity events, and they did well. If you joined early you did well.

I ended up making a few 10s of thousands. Not the 100s it would have taken to compensate for the low pay for all those years. And I probably did better than most by selling what I could when I could. Most people weren't in the money at all.

Maybe if you timed the market perfectly you could have done well. I don't know that anyone did.

St Jude Children’s Research Hospital routinely genotypes/sequences children before drug treatments to optimize initial doses. It makes a huge difference in outcomes for most cancer patients.

But chronic age-related diseases that older individuals care about most are too complicated and too strongly affected by environmental factors to be well predicted by low coverage sequencing or genotyping platforms. Even deep sequencing and perfect telomere-to-telomere personal genome assemblies (still about a $10,000 to 20,000 effort) will not be sufficient. You really need the patient’s full history and deep omics data. Michael P Snyder and colleagues at Stanford are getting close to this type of “future preventive health care” with a focus on type 2 diabetes.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=michael+mo+stanford&so...

Polygenic risk scores based in simple GWAS results and additive genetic models are uninformative (or minimally useful) wrt clinical care for complex diseases—even those that have moderate heritability. There are simple way too many variables, too many undefined gene-by-environmental effects, and too many non-additive effects (epistasis). Polygenic risk scores typically account for less than 20% of variance in disease traits.

Coming around full circle though—-these platforms ARE useful for pharmacogenetic predictions of initial metabolic processing of drugs—- getting us closer to the right dose the first time.

And the SNP genotypes generated by 23andMe are also valuable predictors for a subset of variants that contribute to nearly monogenic disorders.

I had access to any data I wanted to see, download on my work laptop (we all worked remotely). I didn't have to ask anyone, I didn't have to justify it, and AFAIK it was not audited. Logged? I don't know, maybe it was. I had sent mail once regarding to a director and SVP and never received even an ack. Oh by the way, everybody had access, not just me. For that no other access type was required either. Company email was sufficient. And IIRC even the stage env. had product data and stage was truly fair game.

No, I did not misuse and used it handful of times for debugging purposes. I doubt anybody did.

Disclaimer: 23andMe customer and genomesdao holder.

We quit. You didn't give us a real offer, so we're out. We still believe in the company, but you have too much control, so we're leaving to avoid a fight. We did our best, but it's time to go.

I just got a notification from some health services company that my and my toddlers data was accessed. Including medical history, diagnoses, payment details, SSN, birthday. Why was this not encrypted? Given the world today, this is negligent. The government should be able to disolve the company and give the money to the victims.

If there was a willful disregard for "common security and privacy standards", criminal charges against the executive team.

You want my personal life data? It comes with steep personal risk.

And…? You’re going to try and give me credit monitoring when I literally have 2 overlapping credit monitoring offers from the other companies that leaked my data?

I feel you, but my understanding is without clear monetary impact, its hard to collect any amount of money from these companies. Even if you experience identity theft, whose to say this vs one of the other data leaks was the issue.

One, corporate death penalties are nonsense. They’re a distraction from fines.

Two, what would America pay for its adversaries to enact such a policy. Automatic self destruct for the entire data sector.

But 'a distraction from fines'? Fines do nothing to help those affected by such breaches. Even class action lawsuits usually result in symbolic payouts to individual victims. Given the potential consequences of these breathes - especially in the health space, criminal prosecution for those executives responsible seem appropriate, commensurate and incentivising.

Bigger fines. Fines that bankrupt the company. Note: bankrupt. Not shut down. Clean out the shareholders and upper management, possibly spin some stuff off or even break it up. (There is this popular conception that bankruptcy means an F-35 bombs the company’s offices and factories and it’s plain wrong.)

Corporate death penalty is a distraction from bigger fines.

The data was retrieved via credential stuffing, which is trying username/email and password combinations from other data breaches.

It can be argued that 23andMe should have had stricter login requirements (e.g. require MFA, require longer passwords) and by failing to do so they were responsible for the leaked data. Or you can argue that the users didn't protect their own data since they didn't use long, secure passwords that were unique per website.

I'm not a geneticist so I could be totally off the mark; but, to my understanding, the painful part is that is a big disclosure right there

Now imagine that person is innocent.

IMO the hearsay rule is way too biased in favor of the government.

Worse! Say you know it's police asking you questions, and the questions are all very harmless, so you answer them, but then you start to get an inkling that you are a suspect, that they like you for some crime, so now you shut up and/or lawyer up, but guess what: your disposition's change from cooperative to non-cooperative can and will be used against you in a court of law!! What, you say? Yes, the SCOTUS in the 2010s (see Salinas vs. Texas, from.. 2014 IIRC) greatly reduced the 5th Amendment's protections in this way. If you're talking then clam up, the fact that you clammed up -and at what particular question- can be used against you. And if you never said a word to them, that too can be used against you! The only thing that works is to tell them very early on that you will only talk to them with your lawyer present [and since you don't have a lawyer yet you might never talk to them] then follow through.

If the police are talking to you it's either a) they think your testimony can convict someone else, and/or b) they like you for some crime and want to give you ample opportunity to convict yourself of it even if you didn't commit it (they may not know that, but they may like you so much for it that their bias is too strong to see that you're innocent) and even if you have no idea what the heck they're talking about (because they don't even have to tell you).

See all of professor James Duane's videos on this topic, starting with Don't Talk to Police (this one is pre-Salinas), and then the later post-Salinas reprise(s) of it.

Sure. I find out my competitor for the top role has a degenerative disease, e.g. Parkinson’s. It’s not relevant for many years. But I use it, subtly, to shape opinion.

More pointedly: we are in an era of mass disinformation. The simple fact that somebody used 23andMe makes any lie about it somewhat credible.

I know we live in an individualist society, but when you are murdered as part of a genocide that has nothing to do with you as an individual, which is a significant part of the horror of the whole thing. You are then murdered because someone thought you belonged to a group that should be wiped of the face of the earth. Whether you really belonged to that group, whether you share the ideology of the group or of those doing the genocide, wheter you are a really nice individual has nothing to do with it.

So I chose that word for a reason..

It's bad enough they took my fingerprints when I worked for a school district.

There's also things like - the terms of service include the boilerplate "these terms are subject to change at any time", and I don't want those terms to suddenly change to "we will provide your PII to all insurance companies proactively in exchange for a kickback every time they are able to use it to reject a claim".

I already get hassled by the law somewhat frequently because my house used to be the residence of a criminal (2 owners ago it was used as a rental and that owner evicted said criminal). I don't want to add getting hassled by a bunch of people who came in below the max IQ requirements over someone I've never met because they're from "that side" of the family.

When I was sequenced, a bunch of genetic counselors at Illumina analyzed it and said they couldn't find a single gene mutation that was linked to increased risk of disease, which was a surprise to me but is really absence of information rather than information of absence.

But I totally think this is more an absence of information than anything else. We all have a ton of de novo variation and that stuff is not going to be found in the databases.

1. Am carrying two recessive variants linked to a couple extremely rare developmental disorders (prevalence in live births of less than 1 in 10,000,000)

(no, I did not ask my children or my spouse or my parents or any other relatives for "consent").

But do you think there might be a difference between leaving out a cup of coffee you drank from versus publishing it and advertising it online?

What the Nazis would have done if they had gotten their fingers onto such a ddatabase is anybodies guess.

DNA is already protected from use by insurance companies so that's a future harm that already got squashed.

And their murderers mostly only had census data and people willing to snitch on their neighbors to go on. A DNA database? Oof.

If IBM (then known as Hollerith) could do that much damage with German census data on punchcards…

From IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black.

Imagine the "massively organized information" that will be available to people in power in the future. It doesn't have to be a genocide for it to be useful to them. People in power today are fully on board with "social control" and it's so uncontroversial that they talk about it openly.

I hope someone is writing a book on _Corporate Governance in Silicon Valley_, and include stories from, say, 23andMe, OpenAI, WeWork, Uber, and tons more. I'd pay $$ to read 'em all in one place.

/sarc

You can make a lot of money just by betting on companies where the CEO (or the CEO's office) takes listening to customers'(who are rooting for them!) emails seriously, and shorting those that do not.

Honestly CEOs (and/or their staff) paying attention to customers is a typical marker of successful companies.

Example

To: [email protected]

subject: The Day the Music Died

I was looking forward to playing my Yamaha Digital Piano that I ordered from Amazon today when I got home from work at "the country club". Instead I'm stuck tapping this UPS "Delivery Attempted" notice and the melodies just aren't coming through.

?

In the last 6 months I ordered 37 packages from Amazon. I needed to be home for zero.

Why didn't Amazon send me an email, phone call, text, message through Echo, notification through one of my four Amazon iPhone apps, or airdrop from a drone alerting me that I needed to be there for this package?

I also have an Amazon Echo at home so Alexa should have an idea of my schedule and know that the odds of a successful delivery at 4:42pm on a weekday are 1%. Now I'm listening to Alexa play sad songs instead of belting out great new tunes on my Yamaha.

Also, why didn't the UPS driver call or text me when he or she was at my building to ask if it was okay to leave the package? This would have saved them a minimum of 1 trip and I wouldn't have to bet the delivery of my $700 package to a half a cent sticky note stuck to my door being pelted by the Seattle rain.

OK love ya bye

-Breck

Even last week I had a similar experience:

Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 06:24:04 -1000

Subject: the journey of the thermometer

From: Breck Yunits

To: [email protected]

ORDER NUMBER 112-0027370-6957065

Please don't ask me to explain. Look at the shipping history. The package has travelled from Hawaii to California. I am in Hawaii. WTF?? October deliver for an amazon prime 2 day?!!!!

please fix.

thanks lov ya bye!

------

Within hours I got a voicemail:

"Hi, this is Heidi calling from the Amazon executive customer department calling you regarding to the email you sent to Andy Jesse"

And Amazon identified and fixed the problem and gave me a $30 gift card.

----

I tell all the startups I invest in: if the CEO of $1T Amazon with 1.6 million employees can intelligently handle receiving constructive customer emails over a $10 purchase, why can't you?

I'm occasionally prone to self-indulgence in written correspondence.

... (There, I said it.)

I hope that my coworkers are blissfully unaware of this tendency. Sometimes I must write dense things which they must read, because a formal record is required and technology is complicated. But I hope they perceive me as a crisp and clear communicator who makes copious but appropriate use of sentence fragments in bullet point form (not too deeply-nested). With judicious and limited use of humor, and only of the sort that is adequately subtle to be overlooked by any who would not readily accept it.

I would especially hesitate to attempt anything but the most simplifed and direct version of my message in a request for help!

Although I guess when you're emailing a consumer product corp c-suite, you have a greater expectation of patience for customer communications, and of general literacy.

In truth, the exec's mail-tenders are likely relieved to receive anything not written in a hostile tone, and perhaps delighted by anything in complete sentences. All the more so, if they are able to help.

Thank you. May every minor wickedness find its appreciative audience.

My CEO response rate is about 1%. That one time when DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails) responded to my email about my software library 10 years ago. It wasn't even a Ruby library. What a nice guy. A great CEO and engineer as well.

It wasn’t personal emails but rather their assistants. Still a nice touch and issues were always resolved where L1-2 support failed.

Didn't: 23andme, VLTA, Reddit, YCombinator (post 2022)

-----

Nope, we don't have one yet though it would be a good idea. I'm looping in Joe for this.

Thanks for the nudge!

Nathan Co-founder & CTO Help: www.airbnb.com/help Recent press: Washington Post http://bit.ly/KkEzT

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Breck Yunits wrote:

just curious why you don't have a favicon (or maybe it just doesn't work on my computer)?

- favicon police

----

Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 06:19:24 -1000

Subject: Idea: OpenAI should invest in TabNine which uses GPT-2

From: Breck Yunits

To: [email protected]

The product is one in a million. Hard to code without it now.

But the kid seems overworked and like he's struggling to keep up with demand (https://github.com/zxqfl/TabNine/issues/179#issuecomment-547...)

he (or his office/AGI reply bot) always humors me into at least believing he's listening ;)

(he has also always generously provided me with great guidance many times over the years, like when he advised me to take the MSFT offer we got in 2014, when I was on the fence, which turned out to be the right move 110%)

And it needs to be robust enough to prevent the government from subpoenaing data collected by private companies.

That's like asking why the DMV isn't competing with Google for revenue...