The Legal Genealogist points me to the fact that AncestryDNA is now going to work on allowing users to download their data. Here’s the specific section:
AncestryDNA believes that our customers have the right to their own genetic data. It is your DNA, after all. So we’re working to provide access to your raw DNA data in early 2013, which includes related security enhancements to ensure its safety during every step of the process. Moving forward, we plan to add even more tools and improvements for our customers, and any new features will be available to all AncestryDNA members.
If the rights of the customers to own their own data were so important to them they should have front-loaded this feature. As it is, they didn’t, and as many bloggers noted the firm had stated they didn’t have plans to unroll this feature in the near future. What changed? I don’t know the details, but I suspect they realized that many of us who complained in the past were going to continue to complain constantly. Combined with the contrast with its competitors, like 23andMe, and I assume they realized this just wasn’t going to solve itself if they ignored it. The key here is follow up. I’ll assume “early 2013” is no later than March 31st (the first 1/4th of the year). If AncestryDNA doesn’t have the feature out by then I’ll assume they’re not serious, and will begin trying to make sure that their deficits come up high on Google searches again.
Blogs and word of mouth matter a lot in this domain. I convinced James Miller, author of Singularity Surviving, to get his parents genotyped this weekend. Also, after more than two years of harassment a friend who works at Google finally got typed, and will be sending me his data.
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