If I give my credit card to my sister, and she drops it, that’s not MasterCard’s fault. If they were very concerned, they should’ve made sure their relatives were trustworthy.
Comment on 23andMe Blames Users for Recent Data Breach as It's Hit With Dozens of Lawsuits
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months agoThe real issue was the DNA Relatives feature, which allowed information to be shared with other users in the platform. From this TechCrunch article
by hacking into only 14,000 customers’ accounts, the hackers subsequently scraped personal data of another 6.9 million customers whose accounts were not directly hacked
There are 6.9 million people who could have been using 2FA and unique passwords, and their personal information was scrapped just because of 14k accounts which were reusing passwords.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 5 months ago
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
A better example might be the keys to your house and a note out on the counter with a label that says “surewhynotlem’s house key.”
An intruder finds the key, and now has information on where the key can be used. When your house is robbed, it’s the locksmith who is to blame.
key@lemmy.keychat.org 5 months ago
I’d say it’s more like you gave your mom your SSN (or similar private information) because she said she needed it for her will or something. When you gave it to her she mumbled she’d share it with your sister too. You weren’t really paying attention and just went “yuh huh” when you probably should have told her not to. Your sister uses one key for everything and a burglar got a copy of that key from an earlier burglarly. The burglar eventually used the key to rob her and took your SSN, which he’s now selling to identity thieves.
Mom=23andme
Sister=relative
“yuh huh”=not reading the fine print and disabling “DNA Relatives” sharing feature
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
DNA Relatives was an opt-in program, so you had to choose to share your data. To their knowledge, they were data-sharing with their relatives.
Once again, what is a system supposed to do when given the correct login credentials?
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This data of 6.9M users was not private anyways, it’s really not a leak.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Agreed, although name and nationality isn’t really private information to begin with. Just based on the numbers, it seems like it was sharing the information too broadly, probably to 4th cousins twice removed. When users opted in to this feature, the intent was for distant relatives to be able to connect, not to show up on a list of Eastern European Jews to be shared on 4chan.