[sgslo]

"News".

Anne Wojcicki has been upfront with this strategy for many years, even in a fantastic podcast with YC back in 2018: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5I-on-starting-and-scali...

> If I have the world's health information, what could I do? And people were like, "Well, you could cure, you could save, you'd know a lot." The idea really was, well, we should do that.

[thesausageking]

You cut off the next sentence of the quote:

> The idea really was, well, we should do that. Instead of relying on Stanford or Harvard or Pfizer to go and solve a disease or how to be healthy, we the people, we can do it.

When you use language like "we the people", users assume they'll be part of it. Not that Anne will be monetizing their data years later.

I also doubt many consumer read this interview or had any idea their data would be used this way. Maybe it's their fault for not reading the ToS carefully enough, but it's pretty hard for most people to really understand a ToS and also think about how the data could be used in the future.

[dnissley]

Do you think most people would have an issue with their data being used in this way? I think only a very small minority of folks would -- and they're exactly the kind of person who would avoid this service from the get go.

[timmytokyo]

Except that this kind of person is related to other people who might have different views on such consent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg

[cblconfederate]

In her defense, regulators made it impossible for "we the people" to use that data otherwise.

[mbesto]

> When you use language like "we the people", users assume they'll be part of it.

Pedantically, yes "we the people" are part of it - we gave the company our DNA sample. Not sure what you're trying to say?

[tchalla]

In 2018 itself, 23andMe had a partnership with GSK

> As part of the collaboration, GSK can also change the way we invite patients into clinical trials. The genetic and disease information 23andMe customers share will allow us to identify the kind of patients who are most likely to respond well to new treatments so that 23andMe can invite customers who have consented to be contacted to participate in studies that are relevant to them. This could significantly shorten recruitment and reduce clinical development timelines, allowing some medicines to be delivered to patients faster.

https://us.gsk.com/en-us/behind-the-science/innovation/you-m...

I'm not sure what the "news" is.

[tpmx]

They're probably in the news because quarterly results are released in two days. Their core product is facing a retracting market (partially) because of privacy concerns.

Number of genotyped customers:

  FY18A: 2.4M
  FY19A: 3.4M
  FY20A: 2.0M
  FY21A: 1.5M
  FY22Q1: 0.3M

Numbers from https://investors.23andme.com/static-files/8db681b8-4ea3-452... (page 11)

[dnissley]

How do you know it's because of privacy concerns and not because they've exhausted the market of people who want to know about this kind of info? This is very much a one and done type of product -- in fact, the reason I myself haven't gone ahead and done it is because my parents and grandparents have already gotten it done, and I've looked over their results, so I'm assuming there's very little I could learn about myself from it.

[tpmx]

Possibly a combination of privacy concerns and running out of early adopters?

Wojcicki claimed it was the privacy concerns in a WSJ interview from 2019: https://archive.md/E1Zqw

[dhosek]

You could learn about a non-paternal event, I suppose.

[dymk]

That’s literally why I did 23andme, and I found out some very interesting things about my family structure.