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All Those 23andMe Spit Tests Were Part of a Bigger Plan
(www.bloomberg.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
kinda inevitable. with as fast as dna can be sequenced now.. we are publicly broadcasting this information. how can we realistically protect something we broadcast. its kinda like having your photo taken in public. at some point, its gunna happen.
do you have an expectation of privacy on data you publicly broadcast 24/7 everywhere all the time? i dont think so. i think its silly to try.
its only a matter a time before most of the world is captured into a continually aggregated genetic database of unique individuals which will inevitably all link back together.
are there going to be bad actors? yep. lets prosecute those mofos, but this kind of aggregations is far from evil or wrong or.. stoppable.
Holy shit, GATTACA was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual!
i call this the 'tipper gore affect'. aka, 'you see what you want to see'
im kinda hopin we dont go down the full-on genetic editing path as they did in the movie.. maybe just hardcore embryo defect filtering for know diseases/errors
It's not even the genetic editing that was the biggest issue, IMO. It was the pervasive surveillance and discrimination that was even worse.
yep, good point. it would be nice to solve for those issues before theyre applicable to dna. humans still suck in a lot of ways
With appropriate privacy laws and security measures. A smartphone is publicly broadcasting information, in that any other person could receive the radio transmissions emitted from them. But such eavesdropping would be illegal in most cases, and is mostly encrypted to hinder bad actors who don’t obey such laws.
It’s important we act now to ensure there are suitable privacy provisions in place now for all biometrics, before such things as mass DNA collection and sequencing are practical. Once such technology is available, perhaps we will also have to adapt our behaviour in public to prevent leakage of unprotected biometric assets.
Time to start advocating for biometric privacy, and investing in bodysuits and hair nets.
you are completely ignoring the fact that a global genetic database is not only in progress, it is inevitable.
you cannot protect something you not only broadcast to the entire world with every breathe, but are also incapable of stopping or encrypting that data, or breaking its chain back to the other humans to which you got yours from.
we absolutely should protect humans from corporations looking to abuse this data, but you need to understand. its public data, and there is zero you can do about its existence or aggregation.