What prevents you from giving a fake name when sending your test kit to 23andme or others? Could you then get them to send the results to a P.O Box and then request them to destroy your test data entirely?
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" But no matter how you choose to identify yourself in our online community, our Terms of Service require that you provide true and accurate registration information and submit either your own saliva or that of a person from whom you have authorization. What this means is when you register your kit, you must use your real name. Once your kit has been registered, you may change your online profile name to any name you wish to use from within your account settings."
And…
I am sure this could be gamed by someone easy enough. However, if you are concerned about that fact (or what is in the TOS!), I would steer clear of it altogether.
Or, maybe there is a friendly touristy country that does this in an office for $25 and will confidentially send you the results. Who knows…
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When I last applied for life insurance, the insurance company had a nurse come to my office to take blood. Couldn’t they do their own genetic testing?
I guess they could require it but it’d be deemed quite a bit more invasive yet and may not be worth the extra cost. But I could see it happening more in case of family history of diseases with high genetic correlation.
But if you’ve already been tested - at no cost to the insurer - it’s a much lower bar for them to ask for a copy of the results. Plus, until very recently, genetic testing had to be prescribed by physician. If your physician deemed it necessary to have you tested, the insurer would for sure like to know why and what was found. Not quite the same if they asked everyone to get tested routinely since they may get a lot of inconclusive results for nothing.
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Thanks to DoC, I learned something new today from WaPo:
Apparently it’s possible to opt-out of Visa’s and Mastercard’s data analytics / marketing solutions (where your personal info and transactions are anonymized and grouped with others for analytics and marketing). I did not know this opt-out existed. Other than the fact that “anonymized” data can often be de-anonymized, I don’t really see the point of doing this since it doesn’t result in personalized direct marketing, but at least the option exists.
One thing the article didn’t even talk about is the other transaction tracking businesses (like RewardsNetwork / iDine). I have no idea how to prevent them from getting my credit card transaction data. I suspect there should be another opt-out with the networks.
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An article relevant to this thread. Unfortunately there’s little to nothing you can do to keep your data private short of going off-grid:
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I’ve applied to two of these companies for copies of my info.
Nothing so far.
They’re probably slammed from the sudden publicity. And there’s probably nothing you can do to legally force them to do anything for you.
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You surely did!
And the Red Chinese did not stop with Marriott. Barr just nailed 'em for the Equifax escapade, as well!:
The Red Chinese were behind the Equifax data breach
I hope Trump, best as he is able, continues to hold these communists to account. Do not loosen the screws, Mr. President!!
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I’m on Windows 10 using Brave with Disconnect & AdBlock for Youtube. Any suggestions for more security? Would like to block popups. Especially the popups requesting me to stop blocking.
Popups are dead (browser setting). I think you mean full page overlays. AdBlock Plus has a setting (under Advanced) for “Adblock Warning Removal List”, which should block most such overlays. It doesn’t always work and it’s a cat-and-mouse game between web developers and list maintainers. The overlays use JavaScript, so if you have NoScript they won’t show on some sites. Some sites also don’t work at all or don’t display any images without JavaScript.
One other thing will make you more secure is an application firewall (see bullet point #7 under “Internet” in the wiki). I used ZoneAlarm Firewall (free) in the past, but it has slowly gotten worse (feature bloat) so for Windows 10 I switched to Comodo Firewall (also free, although I think the latest version is bundled with antivirus that cannot be unbundled).
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uBlock Origin does the same (and more), so Disconnect and AdBlock can be removed.
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Do you find a lot of istes lose functionality? I end up using Chrome if something doesn’t load in FireFox because of all my add ons. More frequently, I am seeing sites have a “we detected you are using an ad block, turn off”
There are a few that do not work with ABP, so I just disable it only on those sites, it’s an easy setting. Right now I just have discover and capitalone (although they may work now, I don’t re-check after adding something to the allowlist). These sites do not have external ads, and NoScript takes care of external scripts.
There is one big tool that breaks if you have ABP installed, even if ABP is disabled – google captcha. Any website that requires google captcha won’t even show it and you can’t log in. It’s an old and known problem with ABP. I don’t know if uBlock handles it better. However, I would not stoop so low as to use another browser – I have multiple Firefox profiles. Each profile can have its own settings and extensions. One of them doesn’t have ABP, so I only use it when I need to pass the captcha.
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I’ve finally created a profile with uBlock instead of ABP. Now I just need to figure out how to use it… 
This has long been on my to-do list, but it was exacerbated by the fact that something else is broken in my default profile and a few sites stopped working entirely. Plus that profile is very old and had a bunch of remnants from older versions of Firefox.
I was talking about a Firefox profile. Not clear if you are talking about the same thing. In some sense I have time invested in the Firefox profile, but I’ve been putting all of my configuration changes into user.js, and since all plugins support importing/exporting of their settings, creating a new profile is trivial.
I do have NoScript. Also CanvasBlocker, Cookiebro, and a few others.
And even though the data isn’t supposed to be public, sometimes it is:
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You can say that again.
We are in total agreement on this, scripta . . . except maybe I disagree with “sometimes”. I expect most times.
For years I have scrupulously guarded my DNA privacy, which is the ultimate form of personal privacy in my view. So far so good.
But I have no faith whatsoever, should I ever have to receive hospital services or other medical services where blood is drawn, that they would not quietly, sooner or later, make my DNA profile available to this or that database. Laugh and disagree if you want. But that is my view.
I would never make my DNA available voluntarily. Those who do are straight up nuts.
I just realized there’s a big hole in the wiki – digital assistants. Your Google, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Bixby, and all other voice-enabled devices (except those you built yourself and disconnected from the internet) are constantly spying on you. Though this data is not shared for marketing purposes (although my friends swear they get ads about things they only talk about even if they never look at or search for those things), I consider them a huge privacy risk. I can think of a few things to combat this. For consistency with the wiki I’ll list them in order from easiest to most difficult:
- If you don’t need the device, don’t buy it.
- If you need/want/own a device, you can usually turn off or disable the feature that listens for the keyword (“OK Google”, “hey Siri”, etc), but that’s still not a guarantee as some devices have been hacked and used to monitor the victims remotely. You can also cover the microphone. Without this, the devices are constantly listening and sometimes misrecognize the keywords, then record all the sounds for some time.
- Consider alternatives. There’s open source voice assistant software that can be installed on small / cheap computers like Raspberry Pi. It won’t store or send your data anywhere.
Any other thoughts on this?
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