Ugh. I'm so divorced from social media, I didn't even consider the marketing use case for "share your genetic data with your friends"... I wonder if this hack was just someone scraping an API for that (?!!)
It's gross. On a side note, when I asked my father (an educated man in his 80s with a law degree) why he put our genetic information online without asking us, his response was that he didn't put it online, he mailed it, and it was just his own. I only say this to illustrate that the entire setup here resembled a con game to collect genetic data from unwitting people - which if they represented only 25% of the population would be enough to let you deduce the rest. The abhorrent fact that the was handled so flippantly is just icing on the cake.
It's gross. On a side note, when I asked my father (an educated man in his 80s with a law degree) why he put our genetic information online without asking us, his response was that he didn't put it online, he mailed it, and it was just his own. I only say this to illustrate that the entire setup here resembled a con game to collect genetic data from unwitting people - which if they represented only 25% of the population would be enough to let you deduce the rest. The abhorrent fact that the was handled so flippantly is just icing on the cake.