The risks of sharing your DNA with online companies aren’t a future concern. They’re here now
By Nila Bala,
Los Angeles Times
| 10. 21. 2024
Turmoil at 23andMe, a company offering popular at-home DNA testing, has upset the industry. Following the resignation of every independent member of the company’s board of directors, its chief executive, Anne Wojcicki, expressed openness to selling the company and its database of around 15 million customers, raising concerns about the misuse of genetic data.
Although Wojcicki has since said she is focused on taking 23andMe private, the data-sharing risks raised by DNA testing and matching companies are already here. A class-action lawsuit filed in August alleges that the operator of GEDmatch.com, a genealogy site that claims to have a database of more than 1 million members, has been sharing users’ information with Facebook. This revelation should alarm us all.
GEDmatch stands apart from companies such as 23andMe. It’s an open, crowdsourced database that anyone can search. Founded in 2010, it emerged as a tool for genealogy enthusiasts to upload DNA results and connect with relatives. It gained notoriety when law enforcement officials announced in 2018 that they had used the service to identify the Golden State...
Related Articles
By Charles Schmidt, Undark | 09.25.2026
In 2010, scientists at the University of Tokyo and other institutions reported a startling achievement: They had successfully grown a pancreas made almost entirely of rat cells within the bodies of mice. The research was directed by Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a...
By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.29.2026
Cathy Tie slips on a white lab coat bearing her name and the logo of her startup: Origin Genomics. "Welcome!" she says as she leads an NPR reporter, photographer and videographer on an exclusive tour of Origin's labs located...
By Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, The New York Times | 09.08.2026
It is one of biology’s most ingenious rhythms: Every baby is born young. No matter how much wear and tear their parents’ DNA accumulated over their lifetimes, reproduction erases the molecular scars, handing a clean slate to the next generation...
What We Inherit by Sam Trejo and Daphne O. Martschenko; and Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden have a great deal in common, with substantial differences in style and emphasis. Both books attempt, in different ways, to show the reader just where current research into human genomics stands, where that might be going, and why the authors are interested. In short, the influence of genomic research on our societies is already large and seems likely to change them in ways...
