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| What's your DNA worth? |
Is a commercial DNA-genealogical site part of history-news coverage? Sure. I've been working on a DCB biography recently and while the subject I'm writing about has nothing to do with my own family tree, I have found Ancestry very useful not only for confirming basic birth-death-parentage data but for tossing out all kinds of other details: foreign travel, voters lists, leads on newspaper references....
But the news of 23andMe's impending bankruptcy, and the potential sale of all its confidential DNA from millions of customers, not only makes me glad I have always preferred text-record genealogy over the spit-into-our-envelope kind.
23andMe has always been more interested in the medical aspects of DNA testing than the who's your granny part -- and got into trouble with regulators over some of its medical claims. But it has always been kinda dedicated to the enriching-the-founder part as well. Anne Wojcicki is the ex-wife of Google founder Sergei Brin, and apparently very much part of the Silicon Valley billionaire set and mindset.
In 2021 she took 23andMe, which she founded in the early 2000s, public. It raised $6 billion and instantly made her fabulously wealthy in her own right. But barely three years later its value had fallen to 2% of what it was at the launch. Wojcicki now offers to take it private and "buy it back" -- at pennies on the dollar, one assumes. One point the business pages are not raising much: is this much different that the crypto pump and dump scams that any conscious person should already know to avoid? They do, however, urge 23andMe customers to rush to delete all their data there before it is sold to the highest bidder.
Maybe don't willingly entrust your DNA to Silicon Valley. The Mormons have some odd ideas about using genealogy to baptise their dead ancestors and such, but so far Ancestry seems to have been pretty straight about its genealogy services, at least by comparison.
