“The bottom line is, until I get confirmation that they are not, in fact storing anything of mine (bar my deletion and access requests), I’m going to keep hammering home that nobody should be entrusting this company with their genetic material, and if you, as I, made the choice to do so in the past, now is the time to at least proactively demand to have that data deleted.”, you are not being strong enough in your request here. People should not be entrusting ANY private company with their genetic material. The mistake you made so many years back is one that others have continued to make and revolves around trust and curiosity, both being roots of the failures that continue to put people’s information in so many equally important areas at great risk. 23andMe is simply the latest fiasco, and even if they had not gone bankrupt it was not a good idea to entrust this most valuable information about yourself to them. For all the good reasons people come up with for using these services, the intangible risks that inevitably follow and are foreseeable to privacy practitioners, seem to escape their field of vision. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also why we find the state of privacy and abuse of people’s data by so many entities at such an all-time high.
“The bottom line is, until I get confirmation that they are not, in fact storing anything of mine (bar my deletion and access requests), I’m going to keep hammering home that nobody should be entrusting this company with their genetic material, and if you, as I, made the choice to do so in the past, now is the time to at least proactively demand to have that data deleted.”, you are not being strong enough in your request here. People should not be entrusting ANY private company with their genetic material. The mistake you made so many years back is one that others have continued to make and revolves around trust and curiosity, both being roots of the failures that continue to put people’s information in so many equally important areas at great risk. 23andMe is simply the latest fiasco, and even if they had not gone bankrupt it was not a good idea to entrust this most valuable information about yourself to them. For all the good reasons people come up with for using these services, the intangible risks that inevitably follow and are foreseeable to privacy practitioners, seem to escape their field of vision. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also why we find the state of privacy and abuse of people’s data by so many entities at such an all-time high.