The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.
Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.
I mean, I just use a private window as a matter of course because I use the auto complete for common websites and I don’t want anything untoward showing up if I’m looking something up in front of people. I gotta assume that’s pretty common, no matter what people are into.
Yes, the bigger problem is when people think a private window does more than forget their search history and cookies on their device