Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “These Days People Are Really Selling Me on California”

"The attendants of Alpha Persei." Astronomy with an opera glass. 1890.

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not to be all i told you so about ancestry tests but 23 and me went bankrupt and can now legally sell human genetic information to the highest bidder, as per their privacy policy which was signed by approx. 15 million test takers

im still mind blown that people really readily submitted their dna so they could be classed by ethnicity on paper permanently. like yeah theres no way this could go badly huh

Hey um so... yes, private DNA companies definitely need more regulation and this is fucked up and you should delete your data but I just want to call out the privilege of some of these people.

As a donor child (of someone of potentially ambiguous race) and a disabled person with at least two genetic conditions which I cannot get get diagnosed because the genetic testing for both aren't available in Canada (though one isn't yet possible anywhere), we often don't have the choice but to go through private companies. And these private companies only work for donor-conceived/adopted people unless other, non-donor-conceived/non-adopted children or biological parents also use these services.

On a darker note, databases like these are becoming more often used as a last-ditch effort in identifying bodies (whether from crime, suicide, or accident). Especially in the case of transgender victims. (And before anyone says 'well I don't want my DNA going to the cops', the police's use of this is something to advocate for regulation of, not individuals' submissions).

In short: call for regulation of this industry. Don't blame individuals for making appropriate and important use of one of the most powerful technologies of our lifetime.

Exactly this. I’ve had a 23 and me account for a long while…because when the nazis took my grandma they destroyed any and all records or connection to that half of my family. To this day I don’t even know if any of her siblings survived the war. I was desperate to connect to a family that had been taken from me, to the legacy we lost because of assimilation. So yeah, when I was 15 I got an account, and I’ve kept it to this day hoping to learn more about where I come from beyond just “grandma was born in Russia and we don’t know anything else.”

I think it’s really easy for the average white person whose family immigrated from France/Germany/Britain/etc. to shit on the idea of it because if they want to know about their family, there are records they can follow, ways to trace their family line. Why would you give your dna to a random company when you can just type your last name in a database and find all your relatives? But I don’t even know our actual family name — they took fake ones to hide from russia after the war. It’s hard to explain that need for a connection to your family to those who have never had to consider what it would be like to be cut off from that.

Obviously with them selling it’s a huge issue, and with the world the way it is you should absolute delete while you have the opportunity. But too many people here are very on their high horse about having “called it” when so many of us were just trying to find our family.

agree with this. I have zero connection to any of my biological family. I wasn't even given a name, the orphanage had to name me. I have no connections at all, not a letter, not a family medical history, not a last name, not even a keepsake the police found me with, not any known relatives or even my parents. Hell I don't even know my own birthday, the orphanage had to estimate one for me. I used 23 and me just so I could know for sure what race I am. And so I could get the barest, vaguest glance at my history since I have no other information.

So instead of making fun of people who used a private dna database, maybe we should be advocating for fairer practice and better regulations. Some of us didn't do this 'for fun', hell I didn't spend 100 dollars because i thought it was some trendy cool thing to do. I did it because it's the only way I can have the barest information about who i am and where i came from.