It's not even gouvernement, it's other companies. One day some insurance company will decide to pull out your protections because, turns out, you have X% chances to get a cancer by your 40. Then all other insurance companies do the same. Then, one of them accepts you, but you gotta pay N% more for the same coverage
You're absolutely right, I can't think of a single point in history where there was mass persecution of any particular group by a government which might have been far more efficient of they had a handy database of every citizens DNA. Just never happens, not once in all of history. There's definitely no shining example less than a century ago.
What if the government in the nearby future decides it is illegal to watch porn? They trace your ip to your house, come with a search warrant, find you cumsock or vibrator covered in dna and you're in the system. Boink! Off to horny jail with you!
One day some insurance company will decide to pull out your protections because, turns out, you have X% chances to get a cancer by your 40. Then all other insurance companies do the same. Then, one of them accepts you, but you gotta pay N% more for the same coverage
I've been wondering this myself. I don't really agree with the other comments saying it's impossible.
We do genetic testing on the medical side and that data is kept private. I don't see why a company couldn't offer similar stuff, paid privately, for a more comprehensive suite of tests. You could learn about your risk factors and keep the data private.
On the history/ancestry side, it could pick out known biomarkers to trace back from publicly accessible data. You wouldn't be able to track down exact family trees, but I don't think that was the intent since you're looking for privacy. Instead you might get stuff like "you're 40% Greek, 20% North African"
Such a company would
collect a sample
compare the data against literature
delete the data
It could also allow customers to opt in for more detailed analysis (for those that don't care for privacy) and let them know about the risks. Or it could give an option to share anonymized health data for researchers investigating diseases / risk factors
For the record, ancestry dna is basically a scam. Especially when they give you a percentage score.
Ask yourself what is French. Or English. How much interbreeding has happened across the spectrum? It can’t tell you who you are- there is no genetic encoding for culture.
This makes sense, I don't really know how they come up with those numbers. I feel like there is a realistic risk for harm if we DID try to classify it (ex. If you have X gene, you are Y race). It wouldn't make any sense to begin with, and it would enable arbitrary persecution
I'm more familiar with the inverse, where doctors can provide better care by screening for risks and generic markers that are more common for a particular demographic. That actually helps humanity and is worth studying more
Yeah I’ve always thought when they give those stats “how long ago?”. Where people’s ancestors lived could be quite different during different time periods, that I don’t think can be accurately represented by percentages.
Not to my knowledge. It's absolutely pathetic and honestly kinda psychotic that you're not allowed to understand your own genealogy and medical history without giving up pretty much everything about yourself. Forever.
Because unlike a compromised password, you can't just hop on the computer and change your genes (yet??).
Presenting swirlies: a fun fingerprint matching platform. Send in your fingerprints and get to know your fingerprint relatives. Swirls, loops and curves - we got it all! Find new soulmates at swirlies, only 15$ per analysis and 2.99$/year to access the app and keep up to date with your fellow swirlies.
When I was in like 5th grade we took a class trip to a police station.
Once we got there the cops said if we were "good" he'd let us do fingerprints at the end. I was excited till I found out we didn't get to keep the cards, the cops did and they said it was in case we get kidnapped they can find us... When a minute ago it was just a reward for being good.
So I said I didn't want to and the cop and teacher got super pushy and it turned into this whole big thing once parents found out every kid from my school for a couple years got tricked into giving cops their fingerprints.
I was just mad I didn't get to keep the card, they should've just had me do two and kept one.
I'm not sure of the timeline now but I seem to recall that this first came up through GEDmatch (which doesn't do testing itself but allows people to upload results from different companies to compare them) and law enforcement had been creating data in compatible formats based on samples from cold cases. It hit the news because it helped identify the Golden State Killer. This got users nervous and they switched to you having to opt in allow that kind of matching.
FTDNA changed it ToS to allow law enforcement to use their database for rather vaguely defined crimes but that collided with laws (especially in the EU) and privacy groups, hence the large range of options available. In the EU you have to specifically opt in to allow those kind of matches,. elsewhere you have to opt out (which seems a bit confusing to me - it should be a blanket opt in).
Having access to diseases that run in your family when you are adopted is a great benefit of it, and doing that at a private lab is way more expensive. And the one my sister did connected her with family members who were interested in being contacted. It's not that there is a lack of benefit to the service, it's that the services aren't worth the privacy intrusion.
Recently I listened to a Crime Junkie episode where they recommended you send your DNA in for genetic genealogy so that if a John Doe or Jane Doe turns up they can be identified and I was like lmfao no thanks why would I do that when I know they're gonna send it everywhere, to advertisers, to law enforcement,... and I have no way of controlling it. People really don't give a fuck about their privacy. Honestly, it boggles me.
The problem is that to be able to tell you anything about relationships or heritage, they need a certain database, and the quality of that depends on the amount of entries to compare.
Without adding your data set to the collection, they would not gain anything to improve their database, which would de-value it in the long run.
A service that would analyse but not retain your data would have to pay other companies to provide input, and would therefore much more expensive.
Still, those reasons apply. If you want such a service, expect to pay way more than usual. I do expect that some companies offer such a service for VIPs and Celebrities who don't want to pop up in other peoples listings, but they probably pay for it through the nose.
Are you sure you cannot simply opt out while registering the sample? I live in Germany and I can only use these kinds of analyses for ethnicity/heritage analysis since genetic testing of risk factors as therelike are forbidden here. But I remember myheritage (which I used) asked me a lot of questions on how much data I want to share, what I want to share anonymously, what I want to share for research or keep in the database or sample storage for future analyses. I was also able to absolutely delete all data - account, sample destruction, genetic data - from every database. Comes with the obvious caveat that you cannot access any data from your initial analysis anymore but in my situation that was an ok trade off.
Seems to me the hard part is getting the customers to pay the "full" price of getting the genetic sequencing done. 23andme's prices to get tested is rather expensive (> $130 the last time I checked) but they are also getting paid for providing some of that data for various "studies". So they are getting paid to collect and keep the genetic data, so the consumer price of testing ($130) is subsidized by the other revenue channel (i.e. selling access to the data).
I don't know how much it costs to get your genes sequenced, but it's probably more than $130 per sample.
I see it like ads.... as much as everyone wants to complain about watching ads, the alternative is to pay the full price for the service you are consuming. Most of the services we consume are - after all - profit-making companies, and even the ones that aren't have bills that need paying.