Thread: Ancestry.com changed how it determines ethnicity and people are upset

-Ancestry.com, the website best known for helping users create family trees and find distant family members, made a lot of customers angry last week.

Recently, Ancestry has entered the business of DNA testing, which allows users to send a vial of saliva to the company and receive in return a detailed genetic portfolio, including risk for some diseases and estimates of their ethnic ancestry.

Neither the medical nor the heritage information are guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate, but as the science improves, so does the quality of the results. At least, that's what Ancestry insists.

After Ancestry rolled out a new update to its ethnicity estimate system last week, users noticed dramatic changes in their ethnic profiles — some of which is inaccurate, customers say.

The science is simple: Ancestry compares sections of your DNA with a "reference panel" of DNA samples that it knows correspond to a certain place (say, Italy or southern Africa) to try and identify a match. The new update expands the reference panel by a factor of five, so it should be more accurate.

An Ancestry spokesperson told the Free Press "Almost all of our 10 million users saw a change — whether it is seeing a region broken out into more detail (e.g. specifying Sweden or Norway instead of Scandinavia), a small increase or decrease in a percentage from one of their regions or a more substantial evolution..."

https://www.freep.com/story/life/201...ty/1343953002/

Some of the tweets from folk at the above story are funny if you want to click the link.

Here's the original thread where many of us posted our results and where I just posted my revised results:

https://livingfaithforum.com/showthr...-com-DNA-tests