DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it? • Hacker News Board

Re: DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?

#131

Post by whataretensors » Mon, May 14, 2018, 3:36 PM UTC

chillydawg wrote: post #106

whataretensors wrote: post #91

What's up with the hoarding and secrecy of medical data? It's real possibility that AI starts to work and solves all diseases in the next few decades. Maybe that's the point? To horde life-extension and immortality inventions.

Because it's perfect for discriminating against you. First it's health insurance company putting your prices up due to poor genes, then it's an employer getting rid of you because they see genes for depression and addiction.

Discrimination in regards to all sorts of attributes are illegal. Including one of the most useful measurements for predicting job performance, IQ.

You don't need to select for depression and addiction explicitly, companies implicitly do this by forcing normal working hours on their employees.

Insurance is a stochastic tax on the young and healthy to benefit the old and unhealthy. If it's decoupled from employment I don't see why an employer would care. Also, why shouldn't we use all information to predict costs and risk?

This whole medical data hoarding might be a "what if" scenario on AI and immortality.

Re: DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?

#132

Post by j_says » Tue, May 15, 2018, 12:16 AM UTC

If you want your baby screened but don't want your state to keep the sample, the mayo clinic has a screening panel that does all the federally recommended tests, and another one that does this and a bunch more.

The doctors at Kaiser were totally useless when I asked about this: they'd go from "gee, I never heard about this" to "shrug, it's an official state program", and then they piled on the guilt trip about how urgent it is once my kid was born and I was sleep deprived. Bastards.

So you have to research it yourself and get a pediatrician to order the test from Mayo before your child is born, so it's all arranged once you're in labor. Then make sure they use that test, and you opt out of the state test. (Or better yet, if your state claims it's mandatory, refuse the test and if they do it anyway you've got casus belli for a constitutional challenge)

Re: DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?

#133

Post by yetanother1980 » Tue, May 15, 2018, 6:48 AM UTC

watermelon0 wrote: post #90

yetanother1980 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it maybe require accepting that random or targeted drug tests can be carried out and you have no right to refuse? Source this is the case in several countries.

Why do/should they care if people in the gym are on drugs or not? I understand you can be fired from the job because of them (due to negative affect they might have on your work), and when participating in competitive sports, but rejecting someone to the gym for the sole reason of them being on drugs seems in-line to refusing them serving in a supermarket for the same reason.

NB I don't necessarily agree with it.

This is legislation not gym terms and conditions. It is about public policy towards steroids. I.e. one mentally unstable person did something criminal whilst using steroids and then there was a moral panic.

Re: DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?

#134

Post by mijowi » Tue, May 15, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

stmfreak wrote: post #121

mijowi wrote: post #87

I can comment on this firsthand. I was born in a hospital here in California, so my DNA was collected. A couple years ago I heard about this program, which I believe to be a gross violation of privacy and overstepping of authority. I read somewhere that you can have your/your child's sample destroyed by filling out a form and sending it to a state health agency (don't remember the specific one now). You have to provi…

Even more Orwellian, you received a letter "claiming" your samples had been destroyed. You have no proof this was done unless the samples were returned to you.

That is correct. Of course even if the original sample was returned, a digital analysis of it could remain.

Re: DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?

#135

Post by mijowi » Tue, May 15, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

C14L wrote: post #105

mijowi wrote: post #87

I can comment on this firsthand. I was born in a hospital here in California, so my DNA was collected. A couple years ago I heard about this program, which I believe to be a gross violation of privacy and overstepping of authority. I read somewhere that you can have your/your child's sample destroyed by filling out a form and sending it to a state health agency (don't remember the specific one now). You have to provi…

So, when they claimed to having destroyed your sample, did they also destroy all the data derived from it and stored electronically, if any?

All the letter said is that my sample was destroyed.

Re: DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?

#136

Post by mijowi » Tue, May 15, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #97

mijowi wrote: post #87

I can comment on this firsthand. I was born in a hospital here in California, so my DNA was collected. A couple years ago I heard about this program, which I believe to be a gross violation of privacy and overstepping of authority. I read somewhere that you can have your/your child's sample destroyed by filling out a form and sending it to a state health agency (don't remember the specific one now). You have to provi…

I think it's an extreme overstep as well, but I do believe it's possible the data is anonymous. A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Of course, it's just as likely, this already being a government program and a massive overreach at that, that your identifying data is stored in plain text. I just wanted to thr…

> a secure hash of the fields

Possible, but unlikely, given that this is the government we're talking about.

Also, even if they were hashed like that, I just gave them that identifying information as part of the destruction request.