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>I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate. You already have since your DNA is out there in a database.
by evv555 7y ago
>I definitely would not submit my kids to the same fate.
You already have since your DNA is out there in a database.
- johntiger1 7y agoThat's not exactly how DNA works. Their kids should be mostly fine (99.99% similar is still night and day)
- scarmig 7y agoIf the government encounters one of their kid's DNA, that's enough to identify them as a son/daughter of the person with that DNA profile. If a medical insurance company purchases their DNA, analyzes it, and anticipates that a child of theirs is likely to have medical costs 5x the average, those costs will be passed on to those kids, absent legislation to the contrary. This applies to everyone you're related to, as well.
- munk-a 7y ago> If the government encounters one of their kid's DNA, that's enough to identify them as a son/daughter of the person with that DNA profile. I don't believe that's ever been tested in court (so there isn't precedence) and the ways in which DNA are complex enough - and the mutation rate is high enough - that it might be like fingerprints... if you're the only person with DNA that might be like the kind found and you've got some serious suspicion around you for other reasons... then they might be able to use it as supporting evidence or to compel you to submit to DNA testing to confirm the match (which apparently does have precedence in the US... wow America)
- JshWright 7y agoJoseph DeAngelo was caught because one of his relatives did a 23andMe style test.
- cookiecaper 7y agoYeah, this isn't science fiction or conspiracy theory anymore. Several high-profile cold cases have gone hot as police have been trawling the datasets submitted to 23AndMe et al and investigating the family trees of persons whose DNA is similar-ish to the samples in unsolved cases. [0] The results are mainly bupkis anyway, and you're paying for the privilege of having police agencies across the country (world?) give extra scrutiny to you and all of your relations. No thanks. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27/golden-state-killer-dna-website-gedmatch-was-used-to-identify-joseph-deangelo-as-suspect-police-say/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27...
- glennpratt 7y agoIt's all tradeoffs, I want some privacy, but I also like crimes being solved. In fact, I'd see that as a benefit even if I'm related to criminals. Of course this assumes it is used correctly and fairly, which is the hard part.
- slimed 7y agoStunning naivete on display here
- ewoodrich 7y agoHow so? They point out the difficulty balancing personal privacy and tools to identify criminals who have evaded justice. Just because you don't agree with the relative importance placed on either side doesn't make them dumb or naive.
- CaptainZapp 7y agoWhat makes you naive is if you put any smidegeon of hope into the fact that insurance companies will not hesitate to buy and abuse such data to fuck you over left, right and central then you really are beyond help. If you want to risk that, fine. But you're also screwing all your relatives in the same swell process. And that's not only naive and dumb, that's totally reckless.
- exolymph 7y agoDude, what? The whole reason why DNA is forensically useful at all is that you can use it to pinpoint people.
- Legogris 7y agoCourt..? AFAIK insurance companies in the US are free to model and quote you as they wish with the information they can legally get
- mbreese 7y agoActually, they are expressly prohibited from using your genetic information to make decisions about your coverage. It's the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) [1], where: > ... health insurers may not use genetic information to make eligibility, coverage, underwriting or premium-setting decisions. However, it doesn't apply to all insurance: > It does not cover long-term care insurance, life insurance, or disability insurance. [1] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genetic-Discrimination https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genetic-...
- rurp 7y agoThis is good, but also leads to the obvious follow up question of how stringently it has and will be enforced. It's also illegal to lose PII and credit info for millions of people but, well, here we are.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAlso, parallel construction. Also, data laundering - you drop DNA test data into a business analytics third party, and two data brokers later this arrives at your insurance company as a personal profile "created from data about your shopping habits collected on-line and off-line", or something like this. Don't know for sure if that's actually happening, but I assume it is.
- Legogris 7y agoHuh, had no idea, thanks for bringing that up. Obvious follow-up question: Say the insurance company is using a third-party that they buy some kind of individual "healthiness/sickness benchmark" from, that just so happens to be heavily derived from on this genetic information, which the health insurer never sees in raw - would that fall under this? Seems like an easy way to skirt this regulation, but i am obv NAL.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoA parent/child relationship is crystal clear in the genetic data (barring the case where what you're actually seeing is an aunt or uncle and the child of their identical twin). And I'm pretty sure paternity tests have a lot of precedent in US courts.
- tareqak 7y agoDo you mean chimeralism [0][1]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)#Humans [1] https://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=2315693 https://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=2315693
- thaumasiotes 7y agoNo, I mean that your identical twin's child will appear to be your child under a genetic test, for the obvious reason that you and your identical twin have the same genetics.
- Fezzik 7y agoWhich has not been done in court? I work in juvenile dependency law and we use paternity-by-DNA to establish and disestablish fathers every day. Other divisions of the DOJ use DNA to establish parents for the purposes of childcare payments. There are loads of statutes and case law regarding DNA testing to determine parentage.
- MiroF 7y agoUh, it absolutely has - and with more distant connections than direct parentage. See the recent Golden State Killer case for instance, as well as a myriad of others.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoThat shows it's enough to establish probable cause, but once they'd identified him, they got a direct DNA match, which means he won't be a test of the ancestral scenario outlined in the GP.
- saberdancer 7y agoYeah but it is enough for them to find them, and then retrieve a cup the "suspect" used and threw out in public.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoYeah I keep waiting to hear about insurance companies finally paying off politicians enough to get HIPPA revoked.
- ci5er 7y agoWell, yeah, in the sense that a chimp and a human are about 98.5% similar. But from that point of view, humans are 99.9999% similar. The other point-of-view is that a male and a female of a species will end up with approximately 50/50 similarity to either parent. These are different measures coming from different point-of-views. If I were Gengis Khan (and who is to say that I was not!), then I could have impregnated enough women over my days on the steppes, to have, 1000 years late, up to countable percentages of my far-far-far descendents actually detected in tests as being my actual descendents. Please don't conflate "this dna comparative measure" with "that dna comparative measure". It's all (theoretically) straight forward, and, yes, compounded by empiricism, but these are different measures, regardless.
- cortesoft 7y agoIf they get a sample from the kid, they will be able to say with certainty that the commenter is the parent. They wouldn't be able to tell the difference between kids of the same gender, but if you only have one kid or a boy and a girl, they would be able to pick out the kid.
- dnautics 7y agoThat's not how 23andme works, they don't sequence your whole genome, just selected high variance segments.
- ryanmercer 7y agohttps://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dna-from-genealogy-site-used-to-catch-suspected-golden-state-killer-1.4637726 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dna-from-genealogy-site-used-t... They caught him because a relative had submitted their DNA. >Investigators compared the DNA collected from a crime scene of the Golden State Killer to online genetic profiles and found a match: a relative of the man police have identified as Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who was arrested Tuesday at his suburban Sacramento home. The same sort of scenario is possible for medical related things. "John Smith has these health risks, oh look he's listed as the father of our client Jane smith so she likely carries these health risks. Adjust her rate/drop her policy". That said, I willingly gave my DNA to 23andme & Ancestry.com, I find the stuff interesting and worth the potential future risks. Once whole genome falls below a few hundred dollars I plan to have that done too.
- adenner 7y agoHalf of it at least