Hi Kirt,
Thanks for kicking off the discussion with your answer. You bring up some good points and to increase clarity, let me respond separately:
#1 Privacy and data theft
These are obviously two very important points for every company. Data theft has happened at Billion Dollar unicorn companies like Adobe, eBay, Equifax, Marriott International, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Zynga and Twitter (just recently). Garmin got a data breach as well just last week.
Did any of these companies not invest as much money and resources into their security? Still they got hacked, like Government agencies and even Foreign Minister email accounts.
So we can never rule data theft out, it’s a cat & mouse game. I can’t comment specifically on GEDmatch or their new owners precautions but yeah, **** happened.
When it comes to Privacy there’s always a contradiction between what people interested in DNA genealogy want (eg. Find out who their birth father is) and what others want to protect. We’re doing our best with a very limited view of what we show to each of our users. You can see a lot more at 23andMe itself. You should try to check your own name at one of these paid websites in the US that have crawled the web and collected every possible information about you and are selling it! A valid point but I only have to type in your name at Google and a plethora of private information comes up.
#2 “How many times must we put our trees out there (on another sharing site)”
Well, DNA genealogy works only when “DNA” and “Genealogy” is combined. That’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve as IMO most people who test don’t get much out of their DNA test other than the ethnicity report which is good for 5 minutes of small talk at the next party. But combining your family tree and the family trees of your DNA cousins (verified by triangulation) is a powerful combination.
All of a sudden you new links and hints, like in my own case to Scandinavia though my genealogical tree doesn’t indicate that. I’ve found relatives in Tonga, so I read and found out that Germans went there and started a lot of business. I guess that’s where our lines connect. Can I find these things out just by doing genealogy? I strongly believe in sharing “my research”. Most of the info is on my own website, at FamilySearch, at WikiTree, at Geni, at Ancestry and at MyHeritage. Why? Because that increases the chances that I will learn something new, a new connection shows up. Would I like to have only one place? Yeah, but that quite frankly would be FamilySearch.org as it has the largest tree and user base.
#3 “Another problem is that the app is still is asking me (the user) to do a lot in the way of research to find that MCRA.”
Hmh, by “the app” you cannot mean our app. Maybe you mean 23andMe because we do exactly what you would like to have. Present everything on a silver tablet with minimal user effort. You just click cards and the magic happens. We sort your thousands of matches neatly by side, chromosome and start/end position ensuring that they can indeed overlap and thus map. We then go (on a simple click) and put thousands of comparisons (yes, you read that right) on the 23andMe website, retrieve the results and they decide based on that if you do have a triangulated group at the locus you’re matching or somewhere else on the chromosome.