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Private equity firm Blackstone Group will acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com for $4.7 billion, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine
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- Title
- Blackstone to acquire Ancestry.com for $4.7 billion
- Authors
- Chibuike Oguh
- Published
- Aug 5 2020
- Word count
- 273 words
Yeah...but you don't get an almost $5 billion valuation for letting people research their family tree.
They have DNA profiles of 15 million people (as of last year). Being able to do data mining across that seems to be the real asset here.
So, as a very rough estimate, a single person's genome is worth around $300 to Blackstone.
These services are appealing if it weren't for the complete forfeiture of the most important data you have. My friends don't see the real risk in handing DNA data over to these companies and it sometimes blows my mind, especially when news like this comes about.
With that said (sorry this is a bit off-topic), I was curious that if you were a European covered under GDPR or in California under CCPA, if you could get the results and raw data from these companies and then immediately ask to have your data deleted?
My spouse used one of these at-home kits several years ago. She didn't want her data mined and associated with her, though, so she checked the "I don't consent to have this data aggregated or shared in any way" checkbox, and also the "Delete my data after 30 (or 90?) days" checkbox. She gave a fake name, paid with a pre-paid gift card, and used a burner email address to get the results. No, she's not a spy being hunted by a foreign government - just someone who's sick of being sold and sold to. Sometimes we get a little extreme at these sorts of things, but it's as much to see if we can do it as it is for the (probably limited) protection it gives us.
She was able to download her entire genome (or the entirety of what the company generated from her samples) and use it with Promethease to do further analysis. (Not for the faint of heart!)
Despite all that, I once read a discussion of these things on HackerNews and someone who claimed to have worked at the same company where she got her results claimed that they don't ever throw out any of the data. They said that internally, they don't even have a method to do it. They just put it on the form to appease potential customers. I do not know whether that was true or not, but given other unethical things this company had publicly been caught doing, it's certainly plausible. The problem is that you'd have no way of knowing.
I feel as though these services need intense regulation. I’m not happy that my relatives can consent to giving up their genomes, which share a lot of data with my own. As far as I’m aware, they can data mine their collection of genomes. Can they sell data?
It reminds me of having my picture on Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account and don't really want my picture there. But people are allowed to take pictures of strangers in public places in the US, so there's no way I can stop it. And friends and family can tag me even though I don't have an account, so Facebook literally knows my name, address, phone number, email, and what I look like even though I've never had an account and don't want them to have that data. All because other people have me in their contacts and photos and give full permission to Facebook to copy all of their data.
Yes, they can sell your data. They usually will make it part of the terms of service by saying something along the lines of "if you use the service you agree to let us share your data with marketing partners," and things like that. "Sharing" your data usually means selling it (or the moral equivalent of doing so).
I feel like the privacy regulations that are currently hitting the adtech industry about what PII is allowed to be shared with or without consent is the preamble to genetic data sharing.
Adtech had a 25 year run of freely being able to use cookies to share data off of devices and that era is coming to a close. Now data will be shared behind the scenes, and there will be less oversight.
DNA is perhaps the most personally identifiable information that exists and yet it seems it’s currently in its own heyday of operating with little to no regulation. There could be immense value, both for the individual and humanity as a whole by deriving insights from DNA. My fear with seeing a PE firm acquiring a company like this is that the capitalistic incentives of monetizing this data will overpower the benevolence the data could have had.
“In separate cases in 2018 and 2019, the hotel chain Motel 6, which is owned by Blackstone, agreed to settle for a total of $19.6 million for giving guest lists to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without a warrant.[164][165] In 2019, The Intercept revealed that two firms owned by Blackstone were partially responsible for the burning of the Amazon rainforest.[166][167] United Nations housing rapporteur Leilani Farha and Surya Deva, chair of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, have criticised Blackstone's business practices, including frequent rent increases and "aggressive" evictions, for contributing to the global housing crisis.[168]“
Peachy keen org they've got right there.
Well that's a bit surprising. I thought that Ancestry.com was owned by the LDS Church.
But the fact that companies are legally allowed to sell your genetic data is so damn unethical I can't believe that it's still legal to do so. We truly are living in the worst timeline.