23andMe

“Order. Spit. Discover” are the three simple steps listed on 23andMe’s website. By sending a saliva collection kit to the ancestry test company, people can learn more about their family origins in three to four weeks.However, the company’s terms and service also contain a warning, “you may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change.”A group of people who have used these services have learned this the hard way after discovering that they were born of…

What’s next for 23andMe? Most people know the biotech company as a genetic testing service. Stories of people sending their cheek swabs off in the mail only to discover that a parent who raised them wasn’t their biological one have become a kind of millennial horror genre. Of course, most 23andMe experiences aren’t that dramatic: the company says more than 14 million people have used the service in hopes of learning more about their ancestry.But this month, 23andMe revealed it is facing major financial troubles, and more…

Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu (Getty Images), Suzanne Cordeiro (Getty Images), Siegfried Layda (Getty Images), David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (Getty Images), Vladimir Vladimirov (Getty Images), Justin Sullivan / Staff (Getty Images), Mike Coppola (Getty Images), Image: OpenAIThe world seemingly, at the same time, held its breath with the reveal of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, It’s as if everyone watching these marvelous fake videos realized that maybe technology had gone too far. Apple Vision Pro was supposed to be that…

23andMe is in a death spiral. Almost everyone who wants a DNA test already bought one, a nightmare data breach ruined the company’s reputation, and 23andMe’s stock is so close to worthless it might get kicked off the Nasdaq. CEO Anne Wojcicki is on a crisis tour, promising investors the company isn’t going out of business because she has a new plan: 23andMe is going to double down on mining your DNA data and selling it to pharmaceutical companies. Why Bitcoin won’t reach $1,000,000“We now have the ability to mine the…

You had an exclusive partnership with GlaxoSmithKline for five years, from 2018 to 2023. How successful was that?It was overwhelmingly productive. Fifty drug targets came out of it, far more than we expected. They upped it again for one more year, the sixth year, though it’s non-exclusive now. We now have the ability to mine the dataset for ourselves, as well as to partner with other groups. Both the 23andMe and the GSK team felt like there was so much in there, any one group can’t possibly mine everything. It’s a real…

Once considered the hottest startup in Silicon Valley, 23andMe’s fall from grace has been swift and brutal. The genetic testing company, which was valued at $6 billion just a few years ago, is now facing both a possible delisting from Nasdaq and dozens class action lawsuits.It’s all part of the continuing fallout of the hacking of the company last year. The company has since admitted it failed to detect the data breach for more than five months, giving the bad actors the chance to steal the ancestry data of some 6.9…

In October 2023, 23andMe admitted that it suffered a data breach that compromised its users' information. The company has been hit with several lawsuits since then, and according to The New York Times, one of them is accusing 23andMe of failing to notify customers that they were specifically targeted for having Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. They also weren't told that their test results with genetic information had been compiled in curated lists that were then shared on the dark web, the plaintiffs said. 23andMe…

In late 2023, genetic testing company 23andMe admitted that its customer data was leaked online. A company representative told us back then that the bad actors were able to access the DNA Relatives profile information of roughly 5.5 million customers and the Family Tree profile information of 1.4 million DNA Relative participants. Now, the company has revealed more details about the incident in a legal filing, where it said that the hackers started breaking into customer accounts in late April 2023. The bad actors'…

In late 2023, genetic testing company 23andMe admitted that its customer data was leaked online. A company representative told us back then that the bad actors were able to access the DNA Relatives profile information of roughly 5.5 million customers and the Family Tree profile information of 1.4 million DNA Relative participants. Now, the company has revealed more details about the incident in a legal filing, where it said that the hackers started breaking into customer accounts in late April 2023. The bad actors'…

In a data breach notification letter filed with regulators this weekend, 23andMe revealed that hackers started breaking into customers’ accounts in April 2023 and continued through most of September. In other words, for around five months, 23andMe did not detect a series of cyberattacks where hackers were trying — and often succeeding — in brute-forcing access to customers’ accounts, according to a legally required filing 23andMe sent to California’s attorney general. Months after the hackers started targeting…