Thanks Darlene (Athey-Hill) and Ed (Williams) for giving background information to my email and thanks Darlene for posting the info as a G2G post.
To be perfectly clear, I'm the author of the "Your DNA family" app, I'm not affiliated with 23andMe or any of the other DNA testing companies.
I've sent an email to all people that have subscribed and this is where the quotes mentioned by Darlene are from. Maybe the confusion comes from the last line where she lined back to 23andMe's blog post about the recent exposure of user data.
Kristina (Adams), it wasn't meant as an advertisement but I guess I should do some informational campaigns so that genetic genealogist know what "Your DNA family" is. I had people asking if it's a scam on the biggest Genetic Genealogy forum as well.
As for the recent development at 23andMe, this is very sad for the genetic genealogy community IMO. Not only aren't we able to continue our research right now with no way that we can access where DNA matches share DNA with us or download the relatives file (with all this information). It's unclear if these services/tools will ever come back in the same, much more restricted or not at all.
It's also a big set back to the genetic genealogy community in that we will now face even bigger hurdles when we try to convince relatives to do a DNA test, even if we pay for it.
Rest assured, the 23andMe data of our users is saved safely in the cloud and none of their information is lost (that's why they also have way more 1,500 DNA matches without paying for 23andMe's subscription). I will continue to work with my current employees on providing our users with an alternative way to use their 23andMe data, should 23andMe decide to restrict or even discontinue these essential tools for genetic genealogy.
But it's a big blow for all of us and IMO it's a knee jerk decision that seems to indicate that 23andMe currently has no confidence (clue?) to be able to differentiate between a legitimate user accessing vs a bad actor using credentials stuffing like in the recent case. Otherwise they wouldn't have taken such a drastic step to roll down the shutters and reduce the area of attack.
The amount of tools for our hobby are getting less and less (now that Ancestry has put some of their tools behind a paid subscription service) and 3rd party developers like Jonny (Perl), Rob (Warthen), EJ (Bloom) and myself are getting zero support and in some cases even cease & desist letters from the DNA companies lawyers.
The social media posts and news outlets jumping on the hype train by posting incorrect headlines (eg. "Data breach at 23andMe") in order to maximize the number of visits their website gets (and thus maximizing their ad revenue) aren't helping our cause, they are actually harming the genetic genealogy community tremendously.
Luckily the genetic genealogists I got to know over the past 10 years are all extremely motivated and thus we will hopefully overcome this setback as well, as we did with so many others in the past.
