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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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That's a feature of the service that you opt into when you're setting up your account. You're not required to share anything with anyone, but a lot of people choose too. I actually was able to connect with a half-sibling that I knew I had, but didn't know how to contact, via that system.
Nobody "needs" it, lol. People do it because it's interesting to them. That's why it's opt-in.
Why does Facebook need to show you other people's profiles and posts? Why does Lemmy show me your profile and posts? It's how those services work, and people choose to use those services because they work that way.
Hi! If you've used it, there's something I was curious about - how many people's names did it show you?
If 50%+ of the 14000 had the feature enabled, it was showing an average of 500-1000 "relatives". Was that what you saw? What degree of relatedness did they have?
I don't think that opting in changes a company's responsibility to not launch a massive, inevitable data security risk, but tbh I'm less interested in discussing who's to blame than I am in hearing more about your experience using the feature. Thanks in advance!
This list shows 1500 people for me. I assume that's just some arbitrary limit to the number of results. There's significantly overlap in the relationship lists, so the total number of people with data available is less than the (14000 x 0.5 x 1500) than the math might indicate.
My list of possible relations goes from 25% to 0.28% shared DNA. That's half-sibling down to 4th cousin (shared 3rd-great-grandparents).
The only thing I can see for people who I haven't "connected" with is our shared ancestry and general location (city or state) if they share it. I can see "health reports" if the person has specifically opted to share it with me after "connecting".