开云体育

openSNP is shutting down

Dan D. All Messages By This Member #8618 开云体育 FYI, Dan Begin forwarded message: From: openSNP team <info@...> Date: March 31, 2025 at 8:26:49?AM EDT To: dan_draggon@... Subject: openSNP: We're shutting down. Thank you for your support ?Dear openSNP user, today we are writing to inform you about our plans for sunsetting openSNP on April 30, 2025. On this date, we will shut down the openSNP website and delete all the data that we have stored - this includes your email address, password and where applicable genetic and phenotypic data. With this most important bit out of the way, we want to briefly outline our reasoning: When we launched openSNP back in 2011, the world was a different place. Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing was a still quite new and promising technology for research use. With openSNP, our goal was always to give people the choice to open up their own genetic data so that it can be used more widely for research, instead of mostly being used within the siloes of DTC companies and the 3rd parties that can afford paying for access to the data. In 2025, with 23andMe going bankrupt and struggling to even find any buyers for themselves and the data they control, it seems less clear what the use and potential benefit of these data is. While data hosted through openSNP has been used for a number of research studies, teaching workshops and university courses, and producing individual insight, this use has remained the exception. Instead, by far the most transformative impact of DTC genetic data has been found amongst law enforcement agencies, who have made extensive use of the geneological properties of genetic data, ultimately leading to DTC data platforms like GEDmatch being bought by forensics-related companies. In 2025, we are also seeing a global rise of authoritarian and far-right governments that are attacking not only free culture but that are also replacing scientific reasoning itself with pseudoscience. All while large corporations that are aligned with those governments are strip-mining our open data & culture infrastructures - such as free & open software repositories, Wikipedia and others - at the same time. To us, all of this means that the risk/benefit calculus of providing free & open access to genetic data today is very different compared to 14 years ago. We have always promised that openSNP along with the data it hosts is not for sale and want to be true to this to the end. That is why we have decided that sunsetting openSNP by deleting the data is the most responsible act of stewardship for these data. If you are interested, Bastian has written a slightly longer retrospective of openSNP and all the things it has done in the past 14 years here: https://tzovar.as/sunsetting-opensnp/ With this, we want to thank you for your trust and support over this long time. As a small and independent project, openSNP would have never been possible without your help. Gratefully, Helge, Philipp & Bastian -- You are receiving this email as part of the service-communications from openSNP.org

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