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If 23andMe is eventually acquired/reaped, what is the worst thing the new owner can do with the data? to ensure long-term stewardship of the data, a company th
by jakelarkin 9y ago
If 23andMe is eventually acquired/reaped, what is the worst thing the new owner can do with the data?
to ensure long-term stewardship of the data, a company that holds genetic info should be a non-profit owned by the DNA providers, along the lines of a mutual insurance company.
- bluetwo 9y agoSell to law enforcement to find relatives of suspects.
- Spooky23 9y agoSell it to an insurance company, who in the future may be able to discriminate against you due to your genetic characteristics. Sharing fundamental characteristics of yourself with random cloud service providers is probably one of the dumbest things I can think of.
- Trundle 9y agoThey're already discriminating. It's a large part of their job. I much rather they do it accurately than inaccurately.
- maxerickson 9y agoIf insurance companies are able to take advantage of genetic information, won't they just pay people to gather it? Like, for $500 someone could follow you around for several days waiting for the 1 lapse where you leak a little DNA into the public environment. Or you know, they will just discriminate against people that refuse to share their DNA. The narrow wedge where they are forbidden from requiring DNA but free to discriminate based upon it is still a pretty fucked up world.
- idoh 9y agoIt's not really plausible that they would hire people to secretly gather it from you. Maybe they just make it a requirement for getting the insurance at all, that seems cleaner and more scalable.
- daxorid 9y ago> who in the future may be able to discriminate against you due to your genetic characteristics. Look, I know it's fashionable to disavow discrimination in all its forms and for all its reasons, but businesses built on evaluating risk, like insurance companies, NEED to discriminate. It's impossible to price and discount risk without access to accurate information. I'd be FAR FAR more worried about governments misusing my genetic data than insurance companies using it to determine an accurate risk profile.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe insurance company can price risk at the population level, there is no need for it to be able to price it individually. This can be "less fair" to the lower risk members of the population, but the other side of that is whether the insurance company is actually capable of doing the individual pricing in a fair way, or if it is just being presumptuous.
- scarhill 9y agoThe problem is adverse selection. If insurance buyers have information that insurance sellers aren't allowed to have or act on, high risk people will buy, while low-risk people won't. As losses go up, so will the price and when the price goes so high that only the highest risk people will buy, the market will collapse.
- dibujante 9y agoGiving insurance companies more information simply reduces the scope of what they will insure. Highly predictable risk (I will be dead before I turn 150) is not really insurable. Unpredictable risk (I will be struck by lightning) is. Genetic screening just moves some unpredictables to the predictable column. Is it fair? No clue. If it turns out that there's a genetic predisposition to being struck by lightning that modern genetic testing uncovers, then all those "struck by lightning" policies will die - they were subsidizing the highly conductive to the detriment of the non-conductive. Hope you're not highly conductive!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pc86 9y agoTIL using statistical data to make actuarial data more accurate (e.g., insurance) is discrimination.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Spooky23 9y agoYup. "Oh, you're of African background and have sickle-cell anemia. Your sore throat isn't covered as your spleen dysfunction is a preexisting condition."
- mwerd 9y agoI dunno, I think it's pretty trivial to back into life expectancy and genetic risk factors from publicly available ancestry information combined with death certificates. We have ~200 years of pretty good records here in the US and many more if you go into Europe's records. From that data you can get a really good idea of longevity for a given person. Ancestry.com even has a public tool for doing this at a high level: https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=trujillo https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=trujillo Seems the cats been out of the bag for a long time. Maybe you shouldn't throw around 'dumb' quite so liberally.
- manmal 9y agoI think I will request my data be deleted. I have the raw data archived anyway, and run it through Promethease.
- ams6110 9y agoGood luck. There will always be a copy somewhere. That's why I would never use a service like this.
- colechristensen 9y agoSell it to insurance companies, schools, employers, or the government who will grant and deny access and determine cost to you and your descendants inside or outside the law. Business and politics is becoming more and more about using analytics to manipulate you and your fellow citizens. Your genetic makeup along with other data about you could be combined into optimal targeted campaigns tailored to just you to get you to behave in line with somebody else's goals. Knowledge about you correlates with ability to control you.
- sjg007 9y agoThere's a law against this. The anti genetic discrimination law passed by Bush 2.
- cm2187 9y agoLaws come and go. Your data stays.
- psychometry 9y agoSure, and employers aren't legally allowed to discriminate based on criminal record unrelated to the job, but that has never stopped them.
- sjg007 9y agoI think they are allowed to discriminate based on felony convictions etc... at least in the states.
- astura 9y agoA blanket policy of excluding all felons without a legitimate business justification may violate Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 due to disparate impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_against_persons_with_criminal_records_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_agai...
- 9y ago
- zeep 9y agoThey could clone customers... I guess it could be a good thing in some cases, if they don't modify the data.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI am sure Facebook would love to connect that data to theirs. Now you have full surveillance: behavior, face recognition and genetics.
- vijayr 9y agoI read this last year and it is scary https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/14/kuwait-plans-to-create-a-huge-dna-database-of-resident-and-visitors-scientists-are-appalled https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/14... It is never a good idea for a single (for profit) entity to have that much data on anyone.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoNot the worst thing, but they could make it possible for distant family members to locate you based on DNA similarity. This isn't always desirable.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]