DNA Test Services

[Jonesy]

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

How many of you got a DNA test kit for Christmas or have done one? I’m a bit leery of using one; I mean, I’m sending my DNA to a company. Apparently the police can request DNA information from these services. I don’t know if I have any concerns now, but I’m more curious as to what the future holds for these things. At the same time, I think it’s pretty cool.

Anyways, I’m fighting back a cold right now, so I’m holding off my test for a bit. What are your guys’ thoughts/feelings about these services before I send my life code away?

https://www.google.co.jp/amp/s/www.nbcn ... ts-n824776

I told my wife that maybe they’ll find out that I’m the chosen one and they’ll send men in black suits and ties (non-Mormons of course) and hunt down my family and I. She said we will cross that road when we get there. We’ll see.

[h_p]

Stay far away from them, and tell all your friends to do the same:

Inside The Shady World Of DNA Testing Companies

Morgan and his colleagues were caught between a rock and a really-want-to-mess-with-racists place. It would've been fun to throw a "10 percent West African" in there, but then they might have a pissed-off, dangerous person at their office, waving a gun. "Since we couldn't do anything to the results (and we wanted to), what we did was add '< 1 percent' to each African category of ethnicity. That way we weren't lying, and they would both be wondering how much under a percentage point was. We always try to round to the nearest number because we sometimes hear about percentage points, but for them, we leave it open to whether it's a one or a zero."

It's a compromise that's elegant in its passive-aggressive simplicity. And it got a result. "The near-N-bomber wrote to us asking what that meant, and we wrote back that it meant it was under 1 percent. And we were not saying zero. Unless they got another test, that was going to bother them. Maybe they weren't 100 percent Caucasian. I mean, they were, according to the results, but this way it leaves it open, and they'll always be wondering."

Ancestry.com did it to me. I guess since I'm a white Texan, I must be racist. They sure taught me a lesson! Haha!

ancestry-dna.gif (28.39 KiB) Viewed 2754 times

[Fiannan]

I think these are fantastic resources. However, there are a few things people should know. First, national boundaries are not a good indicator of ethnicity. A person from southern France might find out their ancestors were Spaniards (Iberians) who fled the Muslim occupation of Spain. Second, forget the whole "Am I Jewish" or "American Indian" thing because you only have 200 ancestors representatives in your DNA. Each generation gets DNA clipped out. So you could indeed even know an ancestor was full-blooded this or that but that ancestor good weeded out of your DNA genotype. Third, in regards to Jews, most Jewish lines are based on a few Ashkenazi lines out of Spain. Many other lines are either unidentifiable or have disappeared.

So overall, a fun thing to do, unless you find out one of your parents shares 0% of your DNA, or if you discover someone your age you never heard of has 40-50% of your DNA.

[MMbelieve]

I did it 3 years ago, it has helped to find many answers to family geneology and we even discovered and entire new line to work for.

[Jonesy]

Stay far away from them, and tell all your friends to do the same:

Inside The Shady World Of DNA Testing Companies

Ancestry.com did it to me. I guess since I'm a white Texan, I must be racist. They sure taught me a lesson! Haha!

ancestry-dna.gif

Wait, so one of your biggest worries is that it’s not accurate enough or that they might get a race rounded up a percentage that might not be yours? I may just take my chances.

[h_p]

Wait, so one of your biggest worries is that it’s not accurate enough or that they might get a race rounded up a percentage that might not be yours? I may just take my chances.

No, my problem with them is that they are lying to people. They're not finding traces of African DNA, they're just throwing that in there to tweak people on the nose because they're white.

Now, if you think I'm offended that they made me think I might not be purely white, well, nothing could be further from the truth.

[marc]

I had mine done earlier this year. I'm 52% Native American. The rest of my ancestry comes from Mediterranean countries.

[Sunain]

Do not use any of the DNA test services. Stick to traditional methods of genealogical research. Between the privacy and legal issues, they're not really useful.

[kittycat51]

Do your research to find a reliable testing center that's for sure. I am thrilled with my results with DNA testing. You see my father's paternal line dead ends just with my g-g-grandfather. It's the craziest story! Anyway nobody has been able to solve the mystery, not even professionals. So we had a Y-chromosome test done on my father. This is DNA that is passed down from father to son only. The results didn't solve the mystery but what it did tell us for sure was where we are from. This in itself opens up a whole new set of possibilities. Can you say "kiss me I'm Irish"?

[MMbelieve]

Do not use any of the DNA test services. Stick to traditional methods of genealogical research. Between the privacy and legal issues, they're not really useful.

Aside from privacy and legal issues, they are VERY useful.

[cyclOps]

My understanding is police need a warrant to obtain your dna from these places. Same procedure and standard of proof if they got a warrant and swabbed your cheeks for your dna. It does not make it easier for police to get your dna.

[Silver]

Wait, so one of your biggest worries is that it’s not accurate enough or that they might get a race rounded up a percentage that might not be yours? I may just take my chances.

No, my problem with them is that they are lying to people. They're not finding traces of African DNA, they're just throwing that in there to tweak people on the nose because they're white.

Now, if you think I'm offended that they made me think I might not be purely white, well, nothing could be further from the truth.

This is a ridiculous claim. North Africa is totally different from Sub-Saharan Africa. The whole tribe of Israel lived in North Africa for a while. Jethro, who ordained Moses to the Melchizedek Priesthood lived there. The Jews had a large community in Elephantine, and I believe Nibley it was who mentioned that they actually had a small temple there.

As for the results you copy/pasted, I see that it shows Africa North DNA as <1%. Can you think of a number less than 1%? How about zero? 0% is less than 1%.

So, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but no he doesn't tweak anybody's nose.

By the way, I have had two tests done. Very helpful for genealogy.

[h_p]

This is a ridiculous claim. North Africa is totally different from Sub-Saharan Africa. The whole tribe of Israel lived in North Africa for a while. Jethro, who ordained Moses to the Melchizedek Priesthood lived there. The Jews had a large community in Elephantine, and I believe Nibley it was who mentioned that they actually had a small temple there.

It's not a claim. It's what they themselves said they're doing.

[Michelle]

My understanding is police need a warrant to obtain your dna from these places. Same procedure and standard of proof if they got a warrant and swabbed your cheeks for your dna. It does not make it easier for police to get your dna.

Here's just a snapshot of what happened. The guy they accused didn't even take the test a relative did. You should look up the story.

https://www.eastidahonews.com/2017/07/d ... cide-case/

[cyclOps]

My understanding is police need a warrant to obtain your dna from these places. Same procedure and standard of proof if they got a warrant and swabbed your cheeks for your dna. It does not make it easier for police to get your dna.

Here's just a snapshot of what happened. The guy they accused didn't even take the test a relative did. You should look up the story.

https://www.eastidahonews.com/2017/07/d ... cide-case/

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. Is my understanding wrong? Did the police obtain a warrant to get the dna in this incident you reference?

[MMbelieve]

There really isn't anything that is private anymore. We can be watched and listened to through many of our electronics, our text messages and phone calls are not private and every key stroke on the computer is recorded. Our sscard, bank accounts, digitized medical records, email addresses and social media accounts etc.
Our lives are recorded and measured to the extreme.

When getting DNA tested, it's a leap for those who are nervous about privacy for sure. Just have to let go and be alright if your info is less than private. I personally don't care if the cops have my DNA, I'm not a high profile person and not a criminal, plus they already have my finger prints and facial scan for CCW permit. A crazy thought is that hotel cleaning ladies can obtain my DNA from any strands of hair I happen to leave....I just stopped worrying so much and am better off for it. I don't really have anything to hide so perhaps that helps.

DNA tests discovered the truth about my family and has created new relationships and many friends/contacts that have shared photos and stories. I think its just great and the new way to do genealogy, hey perhaps these are all bring brought to us just for this purpose.

[Michelle]

My understanding is police need a warrant to obtain your dna from these places. Same procedure and standard of proof if they got a warrant and swabbed your cheeks for your dna. It does not make it easier for police to get your dna.

Here's just a snapshot of what happened. The guy they accused didn't even take the test a relative did. You should look up the story.

https://www.eastidahonews.com/2017/07/d ... cide-case/

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. Is my understanding wrong? Did the police obtain a warrant to get the dna in this incident you reference?

https://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial- ... -suspects/

You can find more yourself if you are still interested.

[Elizabeth]

https://thegoldwater.com/news/14682-Lif ... y-Brothers

"Two men in Hawaii grew up as best friends for decades before finding out they're actually brothers and surprised their families with the news over the holidays.

Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane have known each other for 60 years ever since being born in Hawaii 15 months apart. The two best friends met in the sixth grade and played football together at the Honolulu prep school they attended.

Macfarlane says he never knew his father and has always wondered about his ancestry. Robinson was adopted and has also sought answers about where he comes from. Now the pair can rest a little easier after finding out the special news.

Macfarlane started by turning to family history websites but had little luck. It wasn't until they used a DNA-matching website that turned up a top match for someone with identical X chromosomes and had the username Robi737.

Cindy Macfarlane-Flores, Walter's daughter, said, "So then we started digging into all the matches he started getting."

Robinson's nickname was Robi and he flew 737's for Aloha Airlines. It turned out that Robinson had used the same website to find out who is family is and that is how they later learned they shared the same birth mother.

It was a shock," Macfarlane said. The two shared their newfound ancestry with friends and family during a party on Saturday night. "It was an overwhelming experience, it's still overwhelming," Robinson explained.

"I don't know how long it's going to take for me to get over this feeling," he said. "This is the best Christmas present I could ever imagine having."

The two best friends are planning on traveling during their retirement together."

[harakim]

I would recommend it. You might learn things you never could have guessed. For instance, my family learned that we are not all related to our biological mother! My dad must have been having an affair. He must have been a real genius to hide that from dear mother.

The only other explanation was the test was completely inaccurate and based on the name and/or the records in ancestry.com or another genealogical service. Also for fun, the records of one of my siblings came out different when they sent them in to the same place twice (under different names). Although, to be fair, they were within like 20%.

[Joel]

dna tests reminds me of the this story

White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don’t like what they find

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Panofsky and Donovan presented their findings at a sociology conference in Montreal on Monday. The timing of the talk — some 48 hours after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — was coincidental. But the analysis provides a useful, if frightening, window into how these extremist groups think about their genes.

Reckoning with results

Stormfront was launched in the mid-1990s by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His skills in computer programming were directly related to his criminal activities: He learned them while in prison for trying to invade the Caribbean island nation of Dominica in 1981, and then worked as a web developer after he got out. That means this website dates back to the early years of the internet, forming a kind of deep archive of online hate.

To find relevant comments in the 12 million posts written by over 300,000 members, the authors enlisted a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, to search for terms like “DNA test,” “haplotype,” “23andMe,” and “National Geographic.” Then the researchers combed through the posts they found, not to mention many others as background. Donovan, who has moved from UCLA to the Data & Society Research Institute, estimated that she spent some four hours a day reading Stormfront in 2016. The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.

About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.

But some took a more scientific angle in their critiques, calling into doubt the method by which these companies determine ancestry — specifically how companies pick those people whose genetic material will be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.

And that criticism, though motivated by very different ideas, is one that some researchers have made as well, even as other scientists have used similar data to better understand how populations move and change.

“There is a mainstream critical literature on genetic ancestry tests — geneticists and anthropologists and sociologists who have said precisely those things: that these tests give an illusion of certainty, but once you know how the sausage is made, you should be much more cautious about these results,” said Panofsky.

A community’s genetic rules

Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe are meticulous in how they analyze your genetic material. As points of comparison, they use both preexisting datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited themselves. The protocol includes genetic material from thousands of individuals, and looks at thousands of genetic variations.

“When a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four grandparents all born in the same country — and the country isn’t a colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia — that person becomes a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,” explained Jhulianna Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe. Then, she went on, the company excludes close relatives, as that could distort the data, and removes outliers whose genetic data don’t seem to match with what they wrote on their survey.

But specialists both inside and outside these companies recognize that the geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry within the sweeping history of human migration. And users’ ancestry results can change depending on the dataset to which their genetic material is being compared — a fact which some Stormfront users said they took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get a more “white” result.

J. Scott Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who has studied consumer use of genetic tests and was not involved with the study, said the companies tend to be reliable at identifying genetic variants. Interpreting them in terms of health risk or ancestry, though, is another story. “The science is often murky in those areas and gives ambiguous information,” he said. “They try to give specific percentages from this region, or x percent disease risk, and my sense is that that is an artificially precise estimate.”

For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

That’s a far cry from the message of reconciliation that genetic ancestry testing companies hope to promote.

“Sweetheart, you have a little black in you,” the talk show host Trisha Goddard told Craig Cobb on that day in 2013. But that didn’t stop him from redoing the test with a different company, trying to alter or parse the data until it matched his racist worldview.

If you ever get a chance to go to a white nationalist rally and play the part perhaps you could find some willing to pay for a test for you

[Sunain]

Ancestry Made Its Privacy Policy More Transparent, but It Still Claims to Own Your DNA

When you spit in a test tube in hopes of finding out about your ancestry, you’re giving companies like AncestryDNA access to a whole lot of very intimate details about what makes you, you. But how consumer genetic testing companies actually use your DNA is often obscured behind many pages of vague, jargon-filled legalese—and as I recently explored, those agreements can hide some rather terrifying clauses.

If you want to make an informed decision about how your biological data is going to be used, being able to understand the policies that dictate data use is key.

“This is a good step,” Joel Winston, a consumer protection lawyer, told Gizmodo. “All this information is readable, and it’s all in one place.”

That said, the digestibility of the privacy policies that govern companies like AncestryDNA and 23andMe is only one part of the problem. Ancestry didn’t actually change any of its policies themselves. In its new language, for example, Ancestry is emphatic that you retain ownership over your DNA, repeating in many places statements like this one:

“You own your DNA data and you can ask us to remove your data from our systems at any time.”

But Ancestry still retains rights to your DNA, too, through passages like this:

“Also, by submitting User Provided Content through any of the Services, you grant Ancestry a sublicensable, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, publish, distribute, provide access to, create derivative works of, and otherwise use such User Provided Content to the extent and in the form or context we deem appropriate on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered.”

One of many articles explaining why it's not a good idea to do DNA tests for genealogical research. Please stick with traditional methods of research.

[Fiannan]

What are people's opinions on which service is most accurate?

[Rand]

My understanding is police need a warrant to obtain your dna from these places. Same procedure and standard of proof if they got a warrant and swabbed your cheeks for your dna. It does not make it easier for police to get your dna.

I imagine that is true, but they are also free to use the data in any self serving way they want, within a few wide parameters. Kind of like Google and Facebook.

[Sunain]

Yet another reason not to use the DNA test services for genealogical research!

23andMe Is Sharing Its Customer Data with Big Pharma

You may have volunteered your priced gene sequence to home DNA testing companies for the higher good of not-for-profit research, it is now going to be used by big pharma for making some new drugs.

Millions of people have trusted 23andMe with their data to learn more about their origins. That trust is often expected by customers, but it’s rarely earned. While you paid for that test, your data seems to be up for grabs if you opted in. 23andMe gives people insight into their genetic makeup via mail-in saliva tests and boasts some five million customers – a DNA database that is considered to be larger than what is usually available to the scientific community.

[larsenb]

What are people's opinions on which service is most accurate?

I did both 23andM3 and Ancestry. 23andMe fit my genealogy better than Ancestry. It gave me about 40% scandinavian, whereas Ancestry gave me 75% scandinavian. A fairly wide discrepancy.