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Dan Loney: Well, the bankruptcy case of
genetic testing site 23andMe is bringing forward an interesting
case around personal data to
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dive deeper into. What should
people do who have provided personal data to one company but
see it gets sold to another?
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Gideon Nave is Associate
Professor of Marketing here at the Wharton School, and he joins
us right now. Gideon, great to
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talk to you again. How are you,
sir? Gideon Nave: I'm well. Always great to talk
to you too. - I would guess
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that when you have instances
like this, that for the most part, people don't necessarily
even think about the data. It's
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just kind of part of doing
business here. - Yeah, I mean, we do know that
our data is everywhere and
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moving around between entities,
sometimes without very clear understanding of us and
transparency of this process.
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But I think genetic data is
something a bit more special than just what we buy and what
we like on Facebook.
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- What makes this so important in
your mind? - There are several layers here,
but I'd say the number one layer
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is that our genetic data is
something that we cannot change about ourselves. We are born
with it. You can measure it for
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us even before we are born,
and it continues to follow us throughout our lives. So you
know, I may be able to change my
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behavior, but I will not be able
to change my genetics. And my genetics includes information
for many other things that,
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because they are determined by
genetics. Even to some degree, I mean, many things are just
partly determined by genetics,
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like personality and so on. But
even these things, the genetic component of it, I will not be
able to change about myself, and
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this data includes information
about it. Not to mention that lots of these things are things
that I even don't know about
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myself, that maybe are in the
data and I'm not aware of it. Maybe I will even choose to not
know deliberately. I will not
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want to know about it. That's
just the first layer. I mean, I can continue with many other
layers.
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- So the concern would probably
be, if a company were to acquire the data that maybe is not
necessarily in that field, but
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is looking to maximize potential
profitability of that data. - Yeah, I mean,
let's say it this way. You
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know, they say it in the Silicon
Valley, that if you're not paying for the product, you are the
product. We kind of agreed to
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the fact that we are customers.
And as a result of being customers, we are providing
something, which is our data, to
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the companies, which makes them
live and survive. But again, this is a bit different for the
case of genetic data. We
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actually paid companies like
23andMe to give us a service, to genotype us. And the sad thing
about this company is that, once
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they gave us the service, we
don't have a strong reason to continue being a customer,
right? So it's not like their
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genetic data now keeps giving us
a lot of value once we got the genetic report. Again, unless
there are some progresses in
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genetic research, and then they
can give us some additional insight, which they did and
actually didn't work so well.
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Part of the reason that it
doesn't work well is that genetics, you know, in most
cases, it's informative of
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things, but it's not
deterministic. It gives you some probabilistic knowledge that,
with the current level of
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genetic data, is relatively
small. We actually never gave 23andMe our data. Just, "Hey, go
do research with our data, or go
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advertise with our data." But
they have this data and they can use it. The question is whether
we are now in a kind of a
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unilateral situation where we
don't get benefit from our data given to them, and they can
still benefit from our data. And
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this is a bit, I guess, an issue
related to autonomy and to informed consent of like, you
know, do I want this to be
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done? If the answer is yes,
then, you know, many people did give informed consent to 23andMe
to use the data for research,
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and I think that this is great.
If you're not okay with this, then you can ask 23andMe to
delete your data. You're
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legally allowed to do this.
Maybe we want to thank the European Union for giving us
this right to be forgotten. And
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you can ask every company,
whether it's Facebook or 23andMe, to forget about you. And if
you're not fine with it, go do
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it. - But how do we avoid the misuse of this personal
data, this genetic data? And
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I guess, from a regulatory
landscape, you mentioned about what Europe has done around this
topic. Obviously, we don't have
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the same kind of structure here
in the United States, but it becomes a more important topic
as we move forward since our
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lives are so much more digital
than they were a couple of decades ago.
- It's
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an extremely important topic,
and it goes beyond genetics. But I think genetics has several
components that make it
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especially alarming, like
genetic data is considered very sensitive also within medicine.
How do we deal with it? Well,
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you know, I think first of all,
many of the GDPR regulations are very much adopted by American
companies because they also
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serve European customers. I
think that one potential limitation of the regulations is
the thing that, you know, with
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consent, you're allowed -- the
companies can do everything they want. And we are consenting to
numerous things every day. Like,
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every time we are going to a new
website, we are consenting to stuff. We have become so
automatically consenting to
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everything that it's very clear
that nothing is going to stop us probably from consenting to many
other things we don't want. And
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then, you know, we have to go
back, and there is a lot of effort of thinking of, what did
I consent to, and where will I --
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it's an issue. It's a problem. I
mean, there may be a business opportunity here for companies
that will kind of try to look at
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what did you consent to, and try
to figure out where your data is. - One of the things that I saw
noted in looking at what we
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might see play out with the 23andMe
bankruptcy process is also, whoever that company is who
comes in and maybe acquires it,
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is having a level of
transparency so that the customers of 23andMe truly
understand where this data is
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going to be potentially living
and going down the road. - Absolutely. And I think
that as a society, we have a
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very strong interest that this
data will be collected. 23andMe is a company
that is very important for the
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future of medicine. It's a
company that collected data, that facilitated breakthrough
discoveries of research. Even,
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you know, you can say
genetics maybe has not delivered as much as we hoped for
when the Human Genome Project
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concluded, and we thought that
we were going to solve all of our problems. But we do gain a lot,
and it's actually crucial that
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we have very large samples when
it comes to genetic data. So we actually all, as a society, are
kind of in a place where
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it's good for us that everyone
give their genetic data, but you know, we do have to pay a price
for it. We do know also that
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there are data breaches. There
are a lot of potential downsides here, and this is like a
classical place where you need
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regulation. I think that in
a place like this, where the benefit is of society, but the
data is so, so, so sensitive, I
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think regulation must take
place. And at the moment, we don't have much of it. We have
regulation about using genetic
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data for insurance, for
job applications, and so on. We don't have it for many other
things. And so once this is the
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case, it's a bit of a broken
area where we have to depend on maybe the GDPR, which
is related to many types of data.
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We rely on the consent,
we rely on the companies not actually just unilaterally
modifying the agreements that
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they have with us and doing
stuff with the data. Yeah, there is a lot of -- there are a lot of
problems here. I personally can
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tell you that I did -- I was a customer of 23andMe and I told them that, "I
want my data. I will have my
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data. But I don't want them to
keep my data, because at the moment, I don't feel like I have
control of where it's going to
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go." And it's a bit sad, because
I'm using data of many, many people in my own research where
we are -- where I'm using it
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to identify genetic variations
that are related to all sorts of human conditions, which I find
very important. - Gideon, great to
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talk to you again. Thanks very
much for your time today. - Thank you. - Thank you. Gideon Nave,
Associate Professor of Marketing
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here at the Wharton School.