I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy.
I know at least two DNA companies that send your data to China for processing and yet nobody cares.
So it may not be the reason of 23andme's problems - it might be just that the market is saturated. People who wanted to take the test, like me, already did it.
I disagree. My parents paid to not have their names and phone number listed in the white pages. So they cared about some semblance of privacy, as it existed back then.
This age of Google and search engines, where anything and everything is captured digitally, and will last forever, is creepy as fuck.
It’s no longer even about your social media profile anymore. Or of the curated pictures that you post online to share with your friends. It’s all about your browsing history now. Your clicks, your mouse movements, your GPS location, your iPhone battery meter, your voice as you wake up. Everything, just to build some profile on you, either now, or in the future, because that data is all there, just waiting to be harvested.
This dystopian nightmare that we now live in, is like some prison that we are born into, and which we don’t even know exists. It’s all around us, and monitoring us, and continuously profiling us.
And it has one and only one goal: To turn us into a penny.
>I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy.
I don't care about most privacy. Will I put a bunch of cameras inside my residence, no. Beyond that I don't much care I mean I use RyanMercer everywhere (here, reddit, forums, social media) and even own 3 of the TLDs which all point to my blog that goes back nearly 20 years to high school where I said some crazy stuff that most people would wish scrubbed from record entirely but I leave them there because that's who I was 19 years ago, 18 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, last year.
There are 7.53 billion people, no one's singling me out trying to target me for something I said 20 years ago or for some gene I have that may or may not be expressed or for what YouTube video I liked in 2014.
Employers, and potential employers, know my credit history. I have a public bankruptcy. My address is public record as is the LLC I controlled and ultimately dissolved. If someone wants to know I Googled "has anyone microwaved an elephant" or "how many golf balls will fit in your large intestine" then I simply don't care.
It's public record my father died of cancer, it's public record his mother died of cancer, my mother has publicly shared she had cancer. I don't feel bad publicly talking about my alcoholism because I'm sure some record has been sold that my father was in inpatient treatment for his and his father had a DUI (as do 2 of my uncles I believe).
Don't watch me shower, don't watch me sleep, don't watch me have sex, don't watch me use the toiler and that's about all the privacy I worry about.
If you don't like me because of my bankruptcy, alcoholism, drug use as a teen, religious beliefs, my review of some movie from the mid 90's, then that's your problem not mine and if you want to preclude me from this or that because of it then good I don't want anything to do with you or your company/service/product.
I know at least two DNA companies that send your data to China for processing and yet nobody cares.
So it may not be the reason of 23andme's problems - it might be just that the market is saturated. People who wanted to take the test, like me, already did it.