timemachineyeah:

bisexilicous:

rosemoo:

obiwanishinaabe:

I will take every opportunity to warn people against these genetics testing “services.” They are huge data mines and prospecting firms, and if you are Indigenous, your submission may be their way around tribal moratoriums against these sorts of collections.

Plus, they don’t mean anything as far as Indigenous identity.

Oh wow, read this. Excerpt, emphasis mine:

“Buried in
the “Informed Consent” section, which is incorporated into the Terms of
Service, Ancestry.com warns customers, “it is possible that information
about you or a genetic relative could be revealed, such as that you or a
relative are carriers of a particular disease. That information could
be used by insurers to deny you insurance coverage, by law enforcement
agencies to identify you or your relatives, and in some places, the data
could be used by employers to deny employment.”

This
is a massive red flag. The data “you or a genetic relative” give to
AncestryDNA could be used against “you or a genetic relative” by
employers, insurers, and law enforcement.

For example, a young woman named Theresa Morelli applied for individual
disability insurance, consented to release of her medical records
through the Medical Information Bureau (a credit reporting agency for
medical history), and was approved for coverage. One month later, Ms.
Morelli’s coverage was cancelled and premiums refunded when the insurer
learned her father had Huntington’s disease, a genetic illness.“

Oh tf wow

Ancestry.com is the woooorst. Don’t use them ever. 

They also are owned by the LDS church, and get all their genealogy information for the genealogy work the members are pressured to do to make sure their extended family (and all of humankind) gets eternal saving ordinances. The church coerces people into providing free labor in genealogy research under the threat of losing your family in eternity if you don’t. They then take that free labor, aggregate it, and sell it for a profit through Ancestry.com. 

So 

like

Ancestry.com exploits the free labor of people to sell it, and also exploits your DNA test results to sell them, so that people can exploit you based on the results of those tests, and they make you pay for the privilege. 

Don’t ever touch that fucking company. 

While the individual above has made up their mind about the LDS church and their relationship with Ancestry, they also show a basic misunderstanding of how the LDS family history site FamilySearch works in relation to other sites.  (Which is surprising because they use a lot of Mormon buzzwords. So ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )  Family History and what FamilySearch does is important to me and so I couldn’t let this one slide, we all have things that are important to us.

Ancestry is 100% commercial and has always approached genealogy from a profit driven perspective. It is not owned by the LDS church, though it is definitely shady. I could list how, but that’s another post. There are LDS people who work there because it’s headquarters is in Utah, so statistics, but there are also Catholic people who work there and Jewish people who work there.  I personally use a lot of Ancestry sources I get through a partnership between FamilySearch and Ancestry because Ancestry can afford to buy data rights that FamilySearch can’t.  This partnership has come to pass because of a couple different things that are very commercial for Ancestry, namely: Data Renting, Possible Future Business, and Brand Politics.  A partnership is not the same as being owned by something.

I wrote something cutesy here about data renting, but I’m skipping it. The first large data collection program FamilySearch performed was called Extraction.  I believe it started back in the typewriter days.  You can still find the old (rebound) books in the Family History Library in Salt Lake.  Back then they called themselves the Genealogical Society of Utah and they were the cutest.  Extraction was almost all paid.  There’s no lay anything in the LDS church, no lay ministry, no lay sunday school teachers (the LDS church has Opinions on priestcraft) and so I can’t promise there were no volunteers, in fact its likely there were they were – just a minority.  The Church hired and paid people to travel the world and microfilm church and government records with no cost to the church or government in question.  (FamilySearch still “films” for free although they’re digitizing now instead.)  Then they hired and paid people to type up the information so there would be a typed index.

After the end of Extraction, FamilySearch came along and got more and more into community projects because of concerns about genealogy becoming elitist.  FamilySearch’s focus was on a global family at a personal level. They even sent people out to record oral genealogies.  Working on community projects decreases cost which allows them to provide more services.  This is the point when Indexing showed up.  Indexing is a way to crowd source collecting the vital information on historical documents.  These Indexes belong to FamilySearch and they aren’t for sale.  They’re accessible for free.  All of FamilySearch is free, all of the photo storage, all of the audio storage, all the digital microfilms and Indexes and family history classes.  Everything is totally free.  If something is free, friend, you’re not making money off of it.

There are people who hate Mormons, like as someone who isn’t Mormon you might think you know how much some people hate Mormons.  You don’t know how much some people hate Mormons.  My inbox is going to light up because of this like its the Fourth of July and Guy Fawkes rolled into one.  Anytime I mention Mormonism they all appear like some weird hatemind, but like, of all the criticisms someone might have of the LDS church, that they slavecamp people into doing family history for the church’s profit is just inaccurate.  And as family history is my precious baby child, I felt the need to say something.

Ancestry.com takes DNA ownership rights from customers and their relatives