The Doctor

Like wrecking the biosphere in its persuit.

So, blaming the victim.

But hardly practical.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

I don’t know.

If a company is dissolved before lawsuits or charges are filed, the argument could be made that the entity in question no longer exists and the filings are invalid. Just like you can’t sue somebody who’s dead. It might not hold up in court but I wouldn’t put it past some very expensive lawyers to try it anyway because it might work.

This article says that “it depends.” There might be a period of time after a company dissolves that it can still be sued, namely, if the legal process to go about it wasn’t followed precisely. If there are no assets remaining sometimes the former owners can be sued. There is also the question of whether or not you’ll spend more on a lawsuit than you’ll get from the settlement.

I just realized something: Most of the time when talking about stuff like this, people seem to implicitly be talking about getting some money out of it (as punishment, maybe). Rarely do folks ever talk about suing for the express purpose of preventing the thing (in this case, selling customers’ genomic information to third parties) from ever happening.

This article talks about suing for undistributed assets. Suing to get your genomic data back and verifying that it’s been destroyed before it could be sold to anyone else is a possibility. It also talks about suing shareholders; if 23andMe is being delisted that seems like a legal gray area to be exploited: If a company is delisted are there still shareholders? Logically, yes (people hold worthless shares of stock in a company that doesn’t exist anymore) but legally? It might be state-dependent as this article suggests (per Favila v. Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP (2010) 188 Cal.App.4th 189, 213).

Maybe under a quiet title action to get the genomic data back?

I’ve had bots scouting for such a thing for a couple of years. So far, we haven’t found any that aren’t way sketchy. Your best bet might be to social engineer the folks at a cellular biology lab at a big college or something, get them to sequence your DNA, and have them copy the data onto a flash drive or something. Then the trick is finding somebody who can analyze the data and make sense of it all.

Let’s break this down a bit:

There is a service that people are likely to use only once. Send them a DNA sample, they sequence it and send you a report. It is highly unlikely that customers are going to have their DNA sequenced repeatedly. The company fails to introduce any other services that lead to customers sending them more money.

This means a revenue curve that goes up, plateaus, and then drops back down.

It was all right there to begin with. The “good while it lasted” curve doesn’t take a lot of imagination.

HIPAA does categorize genetic information as protected health information: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/354/does-hipaa-protect-genetic-information/index.html

That said… it wouldn’t surprise me if all of that data gets sold right before 23andMe tanks, the higher-ups take the cash and split, and there isn’t much left of a company to fine. Company tanks and that’s the end of it.

Articles like this go very far toward chasing people away from things that work and toward things that are dangerous.

Like Telegram.

There are lots of things I could say to agree with you, but all I can do is gesture helplessly.

How do we keep having to have these legal discussions every decade or so?

Google pulled it off with GChat. All told, those of us who run our own XMPP servers aren’t even a rounding error when compared to everybody who uses Google Chat, FB Chat, Slack…

Interoperate with it. Add proprietary extensions faster than other implementations can keep up with (at least two orders of mag). Render software that isn’t yours unusable by suddenly cutting over to something else internally; let connection attempts continue for a while to frustrate users while simultaneously releasing your own. Then cut away all points where legacy connection attempts could be done.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

And make sure they hear about it in such a way that it seems interesting. The fediverse doesn’t use any basic marketing plan techniques, and enough people are conditioned to them (after a lifetime of growing up surrounded by advertising on television and in their spaces) that anything which doesn’t fit that template scoots right by.

Practice safe hex - always wear a write protect chip!

Power cells are batteries. I keep forgetting that not everybody’s worked for Ultium Cells.

Unless somebody specifically installs an explosive charge in a device, it’s highly unlikely that modern power cells will detonate. If you want to get technical about it, they’re incendiaries. They don’t explode, they burn vigorously.

Odds I’ve been hearing for Trump being re-elected are about 3.4 to 1.

The thing about an operation as big as Amazon is that one or two people work on one component of one thing. If the folks who work on that one thing both bail, it doesn’t slow down Amazon or any of its constituent components overmuch. The way things are architected it can chug along for quite a while until somebody else is tasked with learning about and maintaining it.

This is, unfortunately, true. The kids of some family friends are trying in the worst way to get in at Amazon or Facebook to make their bones. They figure that they can build their brands by surviving there for four or five years (Amazon’s reputation for burning through people like toilet paper at Wing Wars is well known in the tech industry, and respected), sock money away because they still live at home, and get a jump on the good life.

I can’t tell 'em what to do. They asked for my advice and gave it. What they do is their problem.

The golden rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”