Opinion - 23andMe sold out and sold your genetic info, no consent necessary

Yahoo

4 days ago

Regeneron's $256 million acquisition of 23andMe, announced last month, isn't just a salvage deal — it's a genomic land grab.
A pharmaceutical titan now owns the intimate biological blueprints of 15 million people. There were no new terms and there was no consent. Just signatures, court approval and silence.
23andMe didn't sell a product. It sold trust. It marketed curiosity, promised empowerment, and built a goldmine from spit tubes and ancestry pie charts. But trust isn't an asset you can auction off. DNA isn't a SKU. It's not a Netflix password you can reset or a Visa number you can cancel.
It's you. It hints at your health risks and reproductive vulnerabilities. It points to your relatives. And now, it is theirs — tucked inside a server farm, commodified and indexed for future monetization.
This isn't about accelerating drug development. That's a public relations veneer. This is about data ownership in a world where data is power. Regeneron isn't just buying a failing company — it's buying leverage over future patients, pricing models and access to treatments they will now develop with your DNA then sell back to you at a markup.
And this isn't a hypothetical threat. 23andMe already showed how fragile the illusion of privacy really is. In 2023, it suffered a catastrophic breach, with 7 million records exposed, such that customers' sensitive genetic data data can never be private again. The stock cratered. Public confidence imploded. Anne Wojcicki stepped down as CEO. And behind closed doors, bankruptcy proceedings turned your biometric legacy into an asset class.
One minute you were unlocking your heritage. The next, you were a data point in someone else's ledger.
The courts greenlit the Regeneron deal, but no one asked the public or the customers. Once it's out, it's out. We have entered an era where biometric identity is currency. Regeneron just cornered a market without a single vote cast.
Worse still, the mainstream press frames this as innovation. They celebrate 'research acceleration' and 'precision medicine' while ignoring the darker implications: insurance discrimination, reproductive profiling and quiet government access.
Because yes, governments want this data too. And no, 'anonymized' DNA isn't really anonymous. All it takes is a surname and a genealogy site, and your entire bloodline can be triangulated. What happens when that data is sold, re-sold and folded into AI models trained to predict behavior, disease or 'risk factors'? You don't just lose your privacy. You lose your autonomy.
We've allowed data capitalism to seep into our phones, our homes, our habits. But this is different. This is about ownership of the human body at scale and pharma giants building the next generation of treatments using genetic profiles you didn't consent to share with them. This is about a world where health becomes a luxury, because the blueprint for your care is someone else's intellectual property.
And let's not pretend this is the end of the road. What happens when Regeneron partners with AI companies to model disease outcomes based on your code? What happens when the genomic data starts syncing with medical records, consumer habits, even location data? You'll be reduced to a profile. A price point. A risk factor. There's no longer a firewall between your body and their algorithm.
We've been trained to treat data breaches like weather events. Inconvenient, yes, but not catastrophic. This isn't that. This is systemic. Regeneron's acquisition marks the end of an era in which data was collected under the illusion of control. From now on, it's inherited. It's monetized. It's weaponized.
And no one asked your permission.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
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