6 ms·

our DNA is private. they should not be able to look at it without a warrant even if someone else slimier to you recklessly throws it in the public domain. Ima

our DNA is private. they should not be able to look at it without a warrant even if someone else slimier to you recklessly throws it in the public domain. Imagine I could read your mind by reading someone else mind. are you ok with me having access to your private thoughts just because someone gave me access to their mind?

fixermark 9y ago
> Imagine I could read your mind by reading someone else mind. are you ok with me having access to your private thoughts just because someone gave me access to their mind? Even if you and I were parent and child, I don't think there's a reasonable philosophy of ownership on which you could hinge the notion that I can't donate the DNA in my cells to a cause because the pattern of half of the (physically completely independent) DNA in your body has a relationship to my own. I do think you're touching upon possibly an interesting wrinkle in the way our current philosophy of ownership treats data about groups vs. data about an individual. Similar lines of thought underpin the question of whether your friends are culpable for sending data about themselves to Cambridge Analytica if it allows CA to extrapolate information about you. However, I currently know of no philosophy of ownership that makes the described scenario bad apart from the general "it's a dick move if you do it on purpose to screw someone else over" (but that hinges on the general category of "Don't screw people over on purpose," not on any concept of joint ownership of data). To pull another analogy: imagine I had dated a rapist and although I didn't have enough evidence to get him convicted of a crime, I told all my friends he was dangerous and now they won't date him. Is this bad? Quite the opposite; it's the system that is already of necessity in place to protect people from bad actors that the legal system fails to handle.
zo1 9y ago
"our DNA is private." How does one even come to such a conclusion?
- aswanson 9y ago
  It's the essence of who you are, your uniqueness against every other living thing on the planet. I can see how psychologically compelling that idea is, even though I disagree.
  - fixermark 9y ago
    That's going to be bad news for identical twins.
    - aswanson 9y ago
      Nah. They've got unique fingerprints. Initial conditions are always unique.
      - fixermark 9y ago
        What I mean is: should I be able to stop my identical twin from uploading his DNA to a genealogy site without my consent because we have identical DNA? Legally, the answer is pretty much "no" right now, and I think it's morally also "no."

fixermark 9y ago

> Imagine I could read your mind by reading someone else mind. are you ok with me having access to your private thoughts just because someone gave me access to their mind? Even if you and I were parent and child, I don't think there's a reasonable philosophy of ownership on which you could hinge the notion that I can't donate the DNA in my cells to a cause because the pattern of half of the (physically completely independent) DNA in your body has a relationship to my own. I do think you're touching upon possibly an interesting wrinkle in the way our current philosophy of ownership treats data about groups vs. data about an individual. Similar lines of thought underpin the question of whether your friends are culpable for sending data about themselves to Cambridge Analytica if it allows CA to extrapolate information about you. However, I currently know of no philosophy of ownership that makes the described scenario bad apart from the general "it's a dick move if you do it on purpose to screw someone else over" (but that hinges on the general category of "Don't screw people over on purpose," not on any concept of joint ownership of data). To pull another analogy: imagine I had dated a rapist and although I didn't have enough evidence to get him convicted of a crime, I told all my friends he was dangerous and now they won't date him. Is this bad? Quite the opposite; it's the system that is already of necessity in place to protect people from bad actors that the legal system fails to handle.

zo1 9y ago

"our DNA is private." How does one even come to such a conclusion?

aswanson 9y ago
It's the essence of who you are, your uniqueness against every other living thing on the planet. I can see how psychologically compelling that idea is, even though I disagree.
- fixermark 9y ago
  That's going to be bad news for identical twins.
  - aswanson 9y ago
    Nah. They've got unique fingerprints. Initial conditions are always unique.
    - fixermark 9y ago
      What I mean is: should I be able to stop my identical twin from uploading his DNA to a genealogy site without my consent because we have identical DNA? Legally, the answer is pretty much "no" right now, and I think it's morally also "no."