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23andMe: Trust the Tech?

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

Image by Victoria from Pixabay

Variations on a theme and in case you missed it, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Privacy, “leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy,” as 404 Media et al reported.

“Once valued at $6 billion, executives have yet to find a bidder for the $50 million gene testing company that has never turned a profit,” Reddit noted, but that’s a whole other story.

“This strategic shift coincides with the resignation of its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who stepped down to spearhead an independent bid to acquire the company after facing repeated rejections from its board,” said Reclaim the Net. “For the millions who entrusted their DNA to 23andMe, the assumption might have been that such intimate data enjoys the ironclad protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law designed to shield sensitive health information from unauthorized disclosure. Yet, 23andMe operates outside HIPAA’s reach, leaving it tethered only to its own privacy policies — rules it can rewrite at will.” Read More...

Who’s the Boss?

Who’s the Boss?

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Everyone’s over the lockdown, and it seems that the world is returning to business as usual. In fact, Amazon CEO announced that as of January 2, 2025, all Amazon employees would be required to return to the office full time. “Andy Jassy, who took over from founder Jeff Bezos in 2020, said the move to end the company’s hybrid model was designed toward “being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business,” NBC reported. “He noted that the company’s three-day-a-week policy, instituted in 2023, had only reinforced the view that a full return was necessary.”

“Amazon has become the latest firm to end working from home in the name of company culture—a PwC reports suggests it could have the opposite effect”, said Fortune by way of MSN. “The Big Four accounting firm conducted 13 months of research and surveyed over 20,000 business leaders, chief human resources officers and workers for its new Workforce Radar Report—and it found that hybrid workers feel more included and productive than those who sit at their company’s desk five days a week…Working in the office 5 days a week to build company culture is a myth, PwC report says.

According to a global online office hours we recently attended, most companies in Europe all back to a work from the office only policy. But is that the right policy today, when companies were literally kept alive during the lockdowns, due to remote work? Were there no takeaways from this inadvertent test of a new corporate work model in this age of technology? Read More...

Tech’s New Blame Game

Tech’s New Blame Game

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Tech is fond of its mantras, especially in Silicon Valley, and the latest seems to be, ‘It’s You, Not Us.”

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached, TechCrunch reported. In December, 23andMe admitted that hackers had stolen the genetic and ancestry data of 6.9 million users, nearly half of all its customers.” Since users “had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature, an optional feature allows customers to automatically share some of their data with people who are considered their relatives on the platform,” the hackers were able to scrape personal data from another 6.9 million customers whose accounts were not directly hacked.

The original hack had been to some 14,000 accounts. Read More...

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay

Remember all the dumb things you did when you were 23 and thought you knew everything? No, the year wasn’t all bad. Then again, when you were 23, you had your moments, too…

We’ve made our list and checked it twice, so without further ado, the people and peccadillos of the year that’s coming to an end, but the real question is, in many cases, when – and where – does it stop?

  1. Sam Bankman-Fried. He held our attention for quite a spell, as tales of his exploits were revealed: defrauding investors left and right and spending money like it grew on trees. Which it did for him: shake the tree and there were even more funds in the FTX coffers. The one-time crypto king believed that his true strength was in his hair and that those carefully unkempt locks made all the difference in his meteoric rise. Maybe they did for a spell, but speaking of locks, fraud is fraud and the former wunderkind is heading to prison for an even longer spell.
  2. The new cryminal class. SBF tops long list of crypto hot shots facing legal reckoning. “His case was far from the first — or last — time that crypto founders and executives found themselves in legal hot water related to their digital-asset activities,” the Toronto Sun pointed out. There was also Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon; Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of Celsius Network; Su Zhu, co-founder of the bankrupt Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and Thomas Smith, Kyle Nagy, and Braden Karony — the people behind the crypto token SafeMoon, who were accused by federal prosecutors of using millions in investors’ funds to buy luxury homes and McClaren sports cars. When you can live that large is so short an amount of time, chances are there’s a small cell in your future.

Biometrics collection is certainly growing. Read More...