Gattaca air filtration tracking here we come.
I was thinking of the cool little vacuums the investigators used. My high school biology teacher has our class watch that movie.
We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#32The thing to keep in mind is that that data can't be just be linked automatically to people, they need, as the article says to "compare these sequences to public genetic data without too much difficulty." It's just another version of a researching accidentally capturing you in a camera, but much harder to link you to the captured information.
The amount of people who have used 23andME, ancestry et all can absolutely help identify people based on their relatives.
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#33Blood is sampled at birth in America, so we aren't too far away from being able to identify people who litter forever. Just takes one policy change... we are building the cells of a possible future prison.
Then why aren't they already doing that with CCTV and facial recognition?
Facial recognition is probably a last resort given there are better signatures.
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#34Wow, it had never occurred to me that the government might establish mass, passive DNA collection. Sort of reminds me of the East Germans and their little scent jars... Would the government have to tell us if they had collected our DNA through passive means in public?
No, you'd need something like a nasty pandemic where people willingly give bodily fluid samples. Like that'll ever happen... Just kidding. That would require a conspiracy on a scale never seen before that is just not possible considering how poorly coordinated governments are and would be stupid to do because if it were to be found out by the public would end in mass revolt.
If we want to continue the scare train, the lockdowns probably increased social media use by a lot on private devices.
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#35But the police will keep complaining about "going dark", despite the massive growth of surveillance and forensics. The less privacy we have, the more of a problem what remains of it seems to be.
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you'd need something like a nasty pandemic where people willingly give bodily fluid samples. Like that'll ever happen... Just kidding. That would require a conspiracy on a scale never seen before that is just not possible considering how poorly coordinated governments are and would be stupid to do because if it were to be found out by the public would end in mass revolt.
Especially with social media, the anger would spread throughout society like wildfire.
Unless said government collaborated with social media companies to censor critical perspectives. Just kidding - like that’d ever happen!
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#37I am no statistician, but wouldn't mass DNA collection reduce the reliability of DNA evidence?
Why could that be a case?
I think the precise location where the DNA is found is more important to proving a case than merely finding it. Environmental DNA lacks this information. When collecting DNA from a scene, I believe there are guidelines and really just plain common sense where you'd want to swab.
That is, finding someone's DNA in a common area is less convincing than finding it on the handle of a weapon. If environmental DNA is abused by an overzealous court, it may call into question the general effectiveness of DNA testing.
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#38But the police will keep complaining about "going dark", despite the massive growth of surveillance and forensics. The less privacy we have, the more of a problem what remains of it seems to be.
2028:
"We need to ban people from possessing tiny organoids whose sole purpose is to spew out large quantities of irrelevant DNA that confuses our sensors."
2029:
"The DNA evidence is fake news, as are the fingerprints, the eye witnesses, the CCTV recordings, the multiple livestreams, the police and news drones that was following the events, the GPS recorder, and the cell phone records."
"Can you prove that?"
"My retinal implant digitally signs and timestamps every image I see."
Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're a small step right now from the police getting access to genetic databases like 23andMe, so if anyone in your family tree has gotten a genetic test it may be possible for them to identify you based on ancestry.
Then they'd know that that person had a relative there. We're still a lot of dots away from going "Well, we found this DNA by accident, it was clearly and obvious Bob was there."
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Re: We can ID people from DNA that shows up in environmental studies
#40Blood is sampled at birth in America, so we aren't too far away from being able to identify people who litter forever. Just takes one policy change... we are building the cells of a possible future prison.
You could say the same about fingerprints, facial recognition, or behavior patterns. People get really paranoid about DNA for some reason but then willingly give out other kinds of PIID without caring.
You can hide everything except DNA.