I see where you're going with your point, but my gut feeling is none of that data is anything new.
We know where Meryem was born (govt records which you probably helped make public), we can read James' twitter feed and we know the relatives of political figures (except for all the illegitimate children).
If you'd like to make an argument that my work led to the publication of personal records, please make it more explicitly. I'd love to hear it fully articulated. Otherwise it's hard for me to read it as anything beyond a swipe.
We are assuming James posted such details to a public twitter feed. That does not account for the others who did not. The issue in Meryem's case is that obtaining birth records is not guaranteed (especially from a foreign country), and that birth location isn't the same as genetic ancestry. Regarding Alex:
> except for all the illegitimate children
That is part of my point. If my absent parent were actually some famous politician, I would personally not want to have that information leaked. Some might not care - that's great. My point is a simple one - just because having private medical info exfiltrated is not really a big deal for many people, doesn't mean that it's ok to give a pass to the parties responsible for the exfiltration.
Sorry, it isn't a swipe directly intended to be a personal attack of any sort. More that govt's, in general, have a habit of leaking personal information for their own benefit.
Your original comment was all about hypotheticals, so yes, it opens up the discussion to assumptions.
Agreed that, in general, it sucks that stuff leaks out. That said, every time someone brings up 23andme, it feels like one of those "the govt is going to shut down in a week if we don't do something!" type of headlines that seem to be on repeat... where in the end it turns out that at the last minute, something is done to prevent it, and everything turns into a giant nothing burger.
We know where Meryem was born (govt records which you probably helped make public), we can read James' twitter feed and we know the relatives of political figures (except for all the illegitimate children).
So yea... I'm still not seeing the issue here.