tl;dr: Folks want to use ancestry to see where and how it goes. What do they need to know? Is there anything to avoid?

I’m not wild on the idea of submitting DNA swabs for a lot of reasons, the recent issues with genealogy.com’s data being a great example. What of tracing family tree by liniage?

  1. The free trial STATTS with ‘sign in using the following services’ I haven’t gone past that point because I don’t want to hand anything over til they show me where they want payment information, because free trials are seldom free and.

  2. The payment page for full signups constnatly ‘reassure’ that you don’t have to do anything each month it auto renews. my family’s gotten burned on auto renewals before where the other end basically refused to stop taking money out in spite of trying to end services.

  3. Anyone know about the library edition how to find out what libraries have access to that and what’s needed to sign in that way?

  • Captain Janeway@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    15 hours ago

    Personally, it’s not worth it. Giving up your DNA can be used against you. People can perform “social proof” phishing attacks on you by claiming sibling relationships. In the USA, law enforcement can use ancestry.com data to aid them in an investigation. So, if you leave some DNA at a crime scene (guilty or not) you might get caught up in the investigation.

    You can also get caught up in the information breaches that seem inevitable with these things.

    Plus: Ancestry.com is not necessarily as accurate as it is purportedly advertised. DNA doesn’t have magic labels that tell us what it represents or where it came from. The only way to associate certain aspects of DNA with a particular gene, region, etc. is by comparing it to large sample sizes of people that exhibit the features you’re seeking out. So, basically lets say you want to know if you come from Scotland. The way they would accomplish that is they would collect DNA from tons of people who - at least anecdotally - claim they are from Scotland. They then use that as a baseline for “Scottish DNA”. When you submit your DNA sample, they look for markers that are unique to those people who claimed they were from Scotland. The less DNA they have from a particular race/region, the less accurate they can be. I’m not saying Ancestry.com is lying. Their methodology makes sense and across broad strokes will give you a reasonably accurate genealogy. They are also capable of validating siblings/cousins thanks to DNA matching. But it’s only as good as the data they have. The more data they have, the more accurate it will be. But that’s probably not public information and would be impossible to tell without access to their PII data. They might have 0% of data from people in Kazakhstan or Laos or Papua New Guinea. So, it’s possible you have ancestry in places they currently can’t know about.

    It’s just not worth it because it opens you up to a lot of risk and the reward is dubious information about your family history. They might know where you’re from, but they can’t give you a 100% ancestral lineage. You might discover lost siblings, cousins, etc. but it’s not really that uncommon (so who cares?)

    Lastly, the cost is just silly. They make you pay so they can have access to your most personal data? That’s wild to me. They should pay you.

    Just my 2 cents though.