That's not the issue. If you store PII, which genetic data certainly is, you have to delete it on request, and you have to allow the user to download all of it, everything they have on you, in standard formats. That's the reason all DNA services have data download options in the first place, but FTDNA's is incomplete.
FTDNA should either offer the BAM file for free on request, or offer the same information in a standard format - such as a fasta file with the reads, or a reference-compressed BAM file - so that the user should be able to reconstruct it on their own, or with a competing service (this is actually a service YSEQ offers). They currently don't do this, which means they're withholding PII.
I could be wrong, but I do believe they get to choose. What I do know is that none of the big testing companies test exactly the same SNPs, there is some overlap but every test is different. They also change their SNP sets from time to time, 23andMe has changed at least 5 times, and interestingly, their current test isn't the biggest (it tests fewer SNPs than some of their earlier ones).
23andMe bet big that genetic big data would be super valuable. That really didn't work out for them.
It turns out that it's more valuable for advertisers to learn if you actually smoke, than that you have a genetic propensity for smoking. Your genotype is just useful for figuring out your phenotype, and in the vast majority of cases, your genetics (especially not at the resolution offered by 23andMe) are not a shortcut to learn your behavior, which is what they're really after.
You're probably already classed as some variety of paranoid/dissident for your careful social media preferences...
Some DNA companies (FTDNA for one) play fast and loose with this.
FTDNA gives you a vcf file, which contains the variant calls, but not the raw reads which those calls are made from (as in the BAM file). They do keep that data, because they charge extra for a BAM file download. It's almost certainly against the GDPR. Worse, I think they do it for anticompetitive reasons - they own the largest Y-DNA tree, and don't want you uploading your raw data to competing trees (in particular YFull).
Well, they're what 23andMe thinks are most informative, for the things they think their customers care about. Or thought; for compatibility reasons they can't change their SNP panels very often or too much.
And the interesting positions are still reasonably randomly distributed by nature :)
True story, I found a god damn tick in my navel yesterday. Sometimes a bit of navel gazing can be healthy, figuratively and literally.
On a reasonable level, navel gazing (the figurative kind) is maybe better called self-reflection. I use DNA for genealogy, and it seems to me from the people I meet, that many get a healthier approach to our identity once we learn more about our genetic background. Identity politics, collective identity building around ancestry - identity building of all kinds really - needs simple stories. And the stories DNA tell are never simple.
You have no power to correct something with gene editing, true, but there may potentially be preventive action you can take. It's all largely hypothetical today anyway, most things you care about (e.g. cancer, Alzheimer's) you can't usually tell very reliably if you're going to get from a DNA test.
That's unlikely, but I do think that the health benefits of full sequence testing yourself are largely hypothetical at this point anyway. Unless you're a competitive athlete maybe?
It's a bit ironic, since FTDNA and MyHeritage (which uses FTDNA's lab) have switched to NGS now, so they presumably could deliver those notorious "health insights", at least better than 23andMe. But they aren't in that market, and 23andMe shows no inclination to switch. They're probably licking their wounds after the user hack and buyout fiasco.
They did not leak their database, the attacker guessed some user passwords and scraped those people's match lists.
I don't think they even got their hacked user's test results - you can download those from 23andMe, as GDPR requires, but it's a "request your data" process which isn't so easy to do at scale without people noticing.
23andMe is also not NGS sequencing, so you get only a couple of 100000 letters randomly* distributed across your whole genome.
YSEQ is basically a mom- and pop shop, two German scientists who helped set up Family Tree DNA's labs in Texas then went home to start a small competitor (I think there was some sort of disagreement or conflict) in the space of high-resolution Y DNA sequencing for genealogists.
They also do high resolution full genome sequencing on request. But be warned, it takes a long time, and they reserve the right to cancel your order if you complain about how long it takes!
They're not the cheapest option, but when it comes to privacy for Europeans, I think they're as good as they come. You want a bit of "difficult to work with" when it comes to privacy.
Far from it. This is a classic example that national governments use EU to launder unpopular policy at home. "We have to, it's a EU requirement". It's hard to think it's not by design, that indeed EU is made to "curb the excesses" of popular accountability.
UK played that game for decades, and it went as it had to go.
That's a completely backward way of seeing it. "Nations" want nothing. The EU council is obviously an EU institution, the institution least accountable to the people of the EU. They want it and force it through as best they can. The parliament, the EU institution most accountable to the people of the EU (not that it's saying much) tried to stop it.
Moderation is when others remove publicly posted content because you don't want to see it. (Censorship is when others remove publicly posted content because they don't want you to see it.)
You don't need moderation for your private communication.
I'm pretty sure that in a room where we replaced nitrogen with co2, we would be dead even if O2 concentrations were the same. Something about partial pressure. I notice AI explanations agree with me (not going to copy and paste them).