Why the 23andMe Data Breach Is Such a Disaster – By Thomas Germain (Gizmodo) / Dec 7, 2023
The consumer DNA harvesting king exposed 6.9 million people’s data. We’ll never know exactly what goes wrong from here.
Earlier this week, 23andMe admitted that an October hack was dramatically worse than the company initially admitted, affecting 6.9 million people, not the 14,000 it first reported. 23andMe followed up with an early Christmas present for users: a terms of service update that would force people to give up the right to sue the company. The stolen data includes full names, genetic information, and more, but despite the sensitivity of the information, some consumers responded with a shrug. As one TikTok user commented on a video about the subject, “What are they going to do, to clone me?”
Hackers probably won’t use your DNA information to make you a lab-grown baby brother, but experts agree: this hack is a catastrophe.
“The truth is that none of us fully know the implications of this breach today, only the certainty that it will grow worse over time,” said Albert Fox Cahn, Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “The ability to weaponize DNA data will only grow more acute as computers grow more powerful. From our health profiles to our family trees to far subtler details of our biology, this hack could potentially reveal so much.”
CONTINUE > https://gizmodo.com/what-23andme-data-breach-means-for-users-victims-1851080672
