341–350 of 402 posts
"In October, the San Francisco-based genetic testing company headed by Anne Wojcicki announced that hackers had accessed sensitive user information including photos, full names, geographical location, information related to ancestry trees, and even names of related family members." For those who do not know, her sister is a longtime Google marketing person since 1999, who worked on AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, Goog…
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"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
I mean, exactly. Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for this quote. It’s hilarious.
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I'm not too worried about it because it's never a 100% overlap. Even my brother and I share only ~50% DNA. It gets way sparser for more distant relatives. About insurance companies, they're legally forbidden to use such data.
>legally forbidden to use such data. Great training set to check the results of other factors, then use those to infer. Moreover "legally forbidden" means jack faeces unless you can point to people who had convictions recorded and went to jail. Otherwise we're merely discussing business conditions & expenses.
I hope that I would have cause to go after them if they leaked DNA from a relative, and that DNA was used to cause harm to me.
Automatically opting-in customers to a more restrictive TOS is pretty suspect, especially given the timing. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that a court would not allow that, given that the TOS was changed AFTER the breach and it's pretty clear that the company is trying to avoid legal issues after-the-fact. I would expect the court would evaluate any breach under the TOS that was in effect at the time of the breach, rath…
Which companies offer similar services sans all the bullshit and privacy issues? I'm not interested in finding long lost relatives and even less interested in having my data sold or shared with LEO.
I would have presumed that security-minded people, which includes those who work in tech, would not so easily give away their genome, and that most of 23andMe's customers are a slice of the general population. But then I read about things like WorldCoin and that people who go to startup parties jump at the chance to give away scans of their retinas and I'm befuddled. Why would anyone willingly do that?
I'm familiar with security (I keep a copy of Applied Cryptography on my shelf for "fun reading") and tech, here's a copy of my whole genome: https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C Note it's a full human genome, far more data than a 23&Me report. You can download the data yourself and try to find risk factors (at the time, the genetic counsellors were surprised to find that I had no credible genetic risk factors). Pl…
While genetic information is not yet understood well enough by masses to be abused in stereotyping and rejecting and — indeed — "cancelling", there is a huge potential to do so. This especially holds true for gender, racial, national differentiation, genetic disease potential and health profiling — all accessible through a full genome (even if some of the indicators are not with 100% confidence). Lots of this can also be used to start linking genome data to an actual person (helped with data from other contexts), which is where it starts to become risky according to known risk profiles.
Unsurprisingly, someone who is likely a white male (I could have checked using your genome too, but loading up your profile above confirms that) with "no credible genetic risk factors" is a lot less concerned about opening up their genome to the public: you are unlikely to get discriminated against. With that said, even you can get potentially ignored for your privilege: even I just engaged in that — somewhat discounting a part of your experience/claim because you are a white male. Part of that is also education: your extensive experience in the field allows you to make an educated choice. Many can't attain that much knowledge before they decide whether to share their genome or not.
This opens up the question similar to that entire face recognition fiasco — how will unprivileged be affected by the privileged being mostly used to train the models on and do research on?
So the question is how do we ensure enough anonymity to make everyone happy to contribute to the world knowledge, but reduce chances of linking data back to actual people? I know nebula.org is doing something of the sort (though mostly just guaranteeing that they will remove the data at your request, and not share it without your permission), but we could have one genome produce a bunch of part-genomes, still allowing causation/correlation research, but none of them having the full picture.
That would disable some of the groundwork research (is there a correlation/causation only visible in the full genome or larger part of it?), so it's a tricky balance to find.
And finally, I always like to make this choice a bit personal: how would you feel about your child being linked to a criminal case due to your genome being publicly available?
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I think if your prior includes "trusting others is a moral and character weakness" then I don't think it's useful for us to discuss this topic further. As for actuaries, in the US, the GINA law prevents health insurance companies from using this data. I think legal protection is much more important than attempting to hide my DNA.
> I think if your prior includes "trusting others is a moral and character weakness" then I don't think it's useful for us to discuss this topic further. I agree, if you can't justify trust with reason then it's hard to trust your argument that relies on trust. Trust can be broken, and your stance doesn't address that concern.
With your own "trust can be broken", you could conclude that you should distrust "with reason" (hey, it was broken) — basically, flipping it is an equally sound stance.
As a rule, I trust people, keep private stuff not easily aggregated (eg. I might talk some stuff over lunch, but will not email it to the person so they have it on record), and I am quick to distrust people once they fail me. Legal protections do matter, because they discourage misuse of unintended data sharing.
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I'm gonna start making clones of you.
I'm fine with that, but merely having my genome sequence doesn't enable you to do that.
Would a bunch of your cells be sufficient at some point in the near future? (I know progress is being made to turn any cell into a reproductive cell, but that's still not exactly the same thing, but it's on that exact path)
You still might not mind a bunch of your clones though, so I don't think that's much of an argument.
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That's your defense? You asked for actual risks and when shown real, plausible ones recede into XKCD quotes. Clearly just a spoiler.
What real, actual risks which I didn't already know about have been shown in this thread? The point is that while you can use DNA to identify people in most cases, sufficiently motivated adversaries have more effective, cheaper, lower-technology approaches that they will use first.
Me shouting my sensitive private details in a crowded bar is entirely different from putting them on my webpage. There's even a difference between writing them down on a napkin or shouting them out.