this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
394 points (97.1% liked)

World News

32285 readers
746 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it's working to verify the data.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not really like they are storing DNA sequences anyways. They use a genotyping array which just reads ~650k single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

An analogy would be 23andme has a 6.4mil page book of DNA for a single customer but they only know the position and letter of single character on every tenth page. Sure it's enough to identify someone (You can confidently use 50 SNPs to identify these days) but it's not like 23andme was ever storing a whole genome