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I can comment on this firsthand. I was born in a hospital here in California, so my DNA was collected. A couple years ago I heard about this program, which I be

I can comment on this firsthand. I was born in a hospital here in California, so my DNA was collected. A couple years ago I heard about this program, which I believe to be a gross violation of privacy and overstepping of authority. I read somewhere that you can have your/your child's sample destroyed by filling out a form and sending it to a state health agency (don't remember the specific one now). You have to provide name, date of birth, and the name of the hospital. I did so, and perhaps a month or two later I received a letter saying that my sample had been destroyed. Clearly these samples are not de-identified if they are able to be located with the info provided. I think this program is utterly disgusting. It's a terrible violation of privacy. The DNA of every baby (born in an actual medical institution) is collected, tested for whatever, and then stored indefinitely. There is no opt-in or opt-out as far as I'm aware, just that you can later have the sample destroyed if you happen to hear about this program and go to the effort of finding out how to do it. This is some disgusting Orwellian BS.

ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
I think it's an extreme overstep as well, but I do believe it's possible the data is anonymous. A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Of course, it's just as likely, this already being a government program and a massive overreach at that, that your identifying data is stored in plain text. I just wanted to throw out it's possible it's not.
- avn2109 8y ago
  Realistically, the odds are vanishingly small that various security-themed agencies aren't already ingesting all the DNA data. This is a treasure trove in the eyes of a police state.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    After the Golden State Killer episode, it’s now probably seen as cheaper for them to just contact companies like 23andme.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I’m surprised 23andme doesn’t start marketing directly to law enforcement agencies, to cast a wider net then CODIS familial searches would.
- fatratchet 8y ago
  I don't think so, even if it was only stored that way the government will still have (name, dob, hospital) info for most citizens saved in some db/list making it easy to recreate the link back to the real person with pretty high accuracy I would assume.
- Sir_Substance 8y ago
  >A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Think about the inputs of the mechanism you just described though. Presumably the goal of the "secure hash" is to prevent government workers from grabbing samples of specific people to do whatever with, so let's break it down. To calculate this hash you apparently need: 1. The name. If you're going after a specific persons sample, you already know this. 2. The date of birth. I don't know when this program started, but if you're alive today you definitely aren't more than 43,830 days old (365.25 * 120). 3. The hospital. I have no idea how many hospitals exist or have existed in California, but lets say there's been 100,000. So the total number of possible hashes given only the name is 4,383,000,000. Sure, you could salt it as well, but the people we're trying to defend from have access to the DB and thus the salt, so we gain nothing from that. Here's some hashcat benchmarks: https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a270c40 https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27... Looks like 1000MH/s is a reasonable rate to be able to process sha-512 hashes, so according to that benchmark you should be able to generate the complete rainbow table in about...4 seconds. It's probably longer given drive speeds and such, I've never actually tried to do what I'm describing, but it does seem like a less-than-one-work-shift process to calculate the hash of a specific person on commodity hardware if that's the only three inputs required. If that's the case, hashing it hasn't made it anonymous.
- mwilliaams 8y ago
  > a secure hash of the fields Possible, but unlikely, given that this is the government we're talking about. Also, even if they were hashed like that, I just gave them that identifying information as part of the destruction request.
C14L 8y ago
So, when they claimed to having destroyed your sample, did they also destroy all the data derived from it and stored electronically, if any?
- mwilliaams 8y ago
  All the letter said is that my sample was destroyed.
stmfreak 8y ago
Even more Orwellian, you received a letter "claiming" your samples had been destroyed. You have no proof this was done unless the samples were returned to you.
- mwilliaams 8y ago
  That is correct. Of course even if the original sample was returned, a digital analysis of it could remain.

ApolloFortyNine 8y ago

I think it's an extreme overstep as well, but I do believe it's possible the data is anonymous. A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Of course, it's just as likely, this already being a government program and a massive overreach at that, that your identifying data is stored in plain text. I just wanted to throw out it's possible it's not.

avn2109 8y ago
Realistically, the odds are vanishingly small that various security-themed agencies aren't already ingesting all the DNA data. This is a treasure trove in the eyes of a police state.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  After the Golden State Killer episode, it’s now probably seen as cheaper for them to just contact companies like 23andme.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I’m surprised 23andme doesn’t start marketing directly to law enforcement agencies, to cast a wider net then CODIS familial searches would.
fatratchet 8y ago
I don't think so, even if it was only stored that way the government will still have (name, dob, hospital) info for most citizens saved in some db/list making it easy to recreate the link back to the real person with pretty high accuracy I would assume.
Sir_Substance 8y ago
>A secure hash of the fields you were talking about would make it possible to lookup when given the correct information, but impossible to reverse. Think about the inputs of the mechanism you just described though. Presumably the goal of the "secure hash" is to prevent government workers from grabbing samples of specific people to do whatever with, so let's break it down. To calculate this hash you apparently need: 1. The name. If you're going after a specific persons sample, you already know this. 2. The date of birth. I don't know when this program started, but if you're alive today you definitely aren't more than 43,830 days old (365.25 * 120). 3. The hospital. I have no idea how many hospitals exist or have existed in California, but lets say there's been 100,000. So the total number of possible hashes given only the name is 4,383,000,000. Sure, you could salt it as well, but the people we're trying to defend from have access to the DB and thus the salt, so we gain nothing from that. Here's some hashcat benchmarks: https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a270c40 https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27... Looks like 1000MH/s is a reasonable rate to be able to process sha-512 hashes, so according to that benchmark you should be able to generate the complete rainbow table in about...4 seconds. It's probably longer given drive speeds and such, I've never actually tried to do what I'm describing, but it does seem like a less-than-one-work-shift process to calculate the hash of a specific person on commodity hardware if that's the only three inputs required. If that's the case, hashing it hasn't made it anonymous.
mwilliaams 8y ago
> a secure hash of the fields Possible, but unlikely, given that this is the government we're talking about. Also, even if they were hashed like that, I just gave them that identifying information as part of the destruction request.

C14L 8y ago

So, when they claimed to having destroyed your sample, did they also destroy all the data derived from it and stored electronically, if any?

mwilliaams 8y ago
All the letter said is that my sample was destroyed.

stmfreak 8y ago

Even more Orwellian, you received a letter "claiming" your samples had been destroyed. You have no proof this was done unless the samples were returned to you.

mwilliaams 8y ago
That is correct. Of course even if the original sample was returned, a digital analysis of it could remain.