You may have heard that 23andMe was hacked. This is devastating news. Here are two recent articles.
According to these articles, seven million records were stolen from 23andMe. DNA information is personal data, yet it is a big-dollar item that is sold and used for devious reasons. You can only imagine how it could be used against you.
Just about any website can be hacked. One must be careful.
During the late 1990s, when the Internet was first available to the public, only a few people could navigate it. I recall having to write a user-friendly menu to sign in. Believe it or not, the two most popular subjects were genealogy and porn.
A program written by the Mormon Church enabled people to record data on family group sheets and pedigree charts and then load it onto the Internet. As a result, we benefited from a plethora of free genealogy information. So wonderful! Yet, as new websites were developed and the Internet became user-friendly, this data disappeared. Large entities, such as Ancestry, gobbled up genealogy information websites. We lost some pretty substantial genealogy resources in those days.
The offering of DNA testing from Ancestry excited an extensive audience. I cannot guess how many millions of people participated in their tests before 23andMe entered the picture.
My generation had good experiences with new websites like Facebook (now Meta). But there were hidden problems, viz: data selling and hackers. When I closed my membership, I could not download the email addresses of the communities I had created. After years of work, I did not get the data. Someone else did. It was sold.
One has to realize that before the Internet, certain businesses “sold” their customer names and addresses. It was a common practice. This practice blossomed over the Internet with email addresses. Today, the FBI and police departments can access our phones and Internet accounts. It is a handy device to catch criminals.
Meanwhile, we are learning that anything we write online can be used against us. And the spamming is out of control. This is the main reason that I use Substack to email my articles. I control the data.