23andMe told victims of data breach that suing is futile

To be clear, the victims of this breach may be targeted for much more than just identity theft or monetary losses, given the way the stolen data has been deployed. This was the first ever industrial-scale attempt to target people of a specific ethnicity using genetic data to identify and &quot;doxx&quot; them for potential hate crimes.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;23andme-user-data-targeting-ashkenazi-jews-leaked-online-rcna119324" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;23andme-user-data-targe...</a><p>One could easily see, e.g. a citizen of a middle eastern country who had some surprising Ashkenazi background being targeted for death as a result of this.

We&#x27;ll see how the EU data protection offices feel about that. Just imagine having something like this happen and then giving your customers the finger. The lack of ethics is impressive. I sincerely hope they get fined into oblivion as a nice example to the next medical company that doesn&#x27;t understand their responsibilities towards their users.

even if there&#x27;s no financial compensation for the victims, it makes sense to make an example out of a company that doesn&#x27;t actually take data privacy and security seriously.

If some authority doesn&#x27;t roll out the guillotine for this one then we should all just give up believing citizens are important in the eyes of the state.<p>I think we all know the answer already.

From what I understand, the hack was due to a large number of people re-using passwords and the company doing nothing to prevent or detect this.<p>Security practices and their ludicrously bad response aside, I cannot fathom why someone would send their literal DNA to a company and then take no steps to secure that information. Is technical literacy really this poor amongst the general population? Even my retiree dad who can&#x27;t reliably turn on his TV on knows about MFA.

[dupe]<p>Lots more discussion earlier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38856412">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38856412</a>