Another point, which is that although the precise composition of alleles in one individual is not known, even a handful of markers are enough to identify a memb

Another point, which is that although the precise composition of alleles in one individual is not known, even a handful of markers are enough to identify a member of a given family. People will share their genomes because sharing is incredibly beneficial and the risks are indistinguishable from 0. As long as people care about genealogy it will be difficult to prevent identification of your genome at a family level. This has been demonstrated for a set of anonymized genomes that were part of public genomics projects. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/321.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/321.short > Sharing sequencing data sets without identifiers has become a common practice in genomics. Here, we report that surnames can be recovered from personal genomes by profiling short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome (Y-STRs) and querying recreational genetic genealogy databases. We show that a combination of a surname with other types of metadata, such as age and state, can be used to triangulate the identity of the target. A key feature of this technique is that it entirely relies on free, publicly accessible Internet resources. Unless we make sharing genomes illegal (and we absolutely should not!) this is going to become a hard fact of life. So we should focus on mitigating potential problems that arise in different ways.