5 ms·

Can someone explain the potential short to medium term fears of one's DNA leaking? My initial assumption is that it would be less of a problem compared to near

by slg 6y ago

Can someone explain the potential short to medium term fears of one's DNA leaking? My initial assumption is that it would be less of a problem compared to nearly any other personal data leaking. Like it certainly sounds creepy, but credit card or other financial data being stolen presents a huge headache and creates a lot of work. I understand that in specific instances, for example when paternity is in question or if a person is hiding from someone this information getting out could be catastrophic, but that applies to such a tiny portion of the population. So for most people, what is the downside to some random individual knowing the country of origin one's ancestors are from or that they might have a genetic predisposition to heart disease? It isn't like any reputable company is going to be able to use this information against us. Plus in the long term there are likely going to be ways to get this information directly and almost instantaneously from any personal interaction you make since we can't really stop ourselves from shedding our DNA wherever we go.

philmcc 6y ago
My hunch is that if this information is used against you, you'd never know. First scenario that comes to mind: The insurance company that gives you an extremely high quote because you come back as "high risk" from a 3rd party company that they use to vet applications, and that 3rd party company uses your genetic predisposition for a condition.
- mej10 6y ago
  For what it's worth, that is illegal in the USA at least. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act passed in 2008.
  - sk5t 6y ago
    Which covers health insurance, not life insurance and others.
- slg 6y ago
  This requires the insurance company to be doing something illegal and for it to really cause damage all their competitors have to be doing it as well. If this ever becomes widespread, it would be quickly obvious when a large number of ostensibly healthy people are given quotes that match their genetic profile but not their medical history. I'm just not sure that is a reasonable fear.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    I am also extremely dubious of this risk. At least in the US, a conspiracy of this sort would require hundreds of potentially-disgruntled employees to resist getting rich from whistleblower rewards.
    - pavel_lishin 6y ago
      Or half a dozen engineers building a new "AI-driven" risk evaluation service with nebulous inputs from their manager.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      Except these don’t regularly turn up fraud. Wells Fargo kept it going for years. Bernie Madoff kept it going for years. People knew about both.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Mix the DNA info into a machine learning insura-bot and you'll never be able to extract the evidence.
  - site-packages1 6y ago
    I think insurance companies aren't above doing anything illegal, especially if it can not insure you/drive you away with a high quote if it saves them many years and millions and millions of dollars covering someone's care for Huntington's or chemo for breast cancer or some other terrible disease for which someone is genetically predisposed. The punishment for violations of the Genetic Information NonDiscrimination Act can be up to a million dollars in fines and some jail time. It is exceedingly rare for corporate officers to go to jail for acts of corporations, so likely violations would simply be fines. Cancer is expensive to cover (less so for insurance companies working with hospitals, much more for you and I), and the fines are relatively small, with the chance of jail time exceedingly small. I am unaware of anyone who has been prosecuted under this Act at all. I did a cursory search and didn't see anything. The forgoing leads me to believe that like many crimes that have low rates of prosecution and relatively small fines, it would probably make sense for a corporate board (or series of employees acting under mutual light peer pressure) to use DNA information as an input into their actuarial tables. Additionally, it would be difficult to spot clusters of people who are otherwise healthy with high insurance quotes. Even if you had the actual insurance quotes, getting peoples' medical information, especially in bulk, is extremely difficult because the aggregators of such information are typically bound by HIPAA. All that to say, I think this is an extremely reasonable concerned and I would be shocked if companies didn't already use DNA information in some form, even if that form is as some input to a machine learning model, but I'll demurr on that subject because I know little about it.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I may be one of the people who lost DNA in this breach. I am not currently worried about anything, but I also know that I don’t know everything DNA can be used for. My greatest concern consists of things some smart crook might think of doing. While a reputable company might not use the DNA for fear of getting sued, they might use a crappy contractor who does not care. Banks care about information security and take it seriously. They use a crappy contractor called Equifax which doesn’t.
- andrewem 6y ago
  This is a side note about your example, but you say "Banks care about information security and take it seriously. They use a crappy contractor called Equifax which doesn’t." If banks send important information to a contractor which they're unable to verify takes information security seriously, then it's hard to see how the banks can be said to be taking it seriously.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    They take it seriously until the liability shield of contracts and separate corporate entities takes over.
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  Think bigger. Insurance. Loans. Financial predation. The right to bear arms. Social stigma created by incumbent politicians wishing to divide their people over meaningless differences.
bagacrap 6y ago
this presentation outlines the kind of terrible attacks that could be based on your DNA in the near future https://youtu.be/HKQDSgBHPfY https://youtu.be/HKQDSgBHPfY tldr, CRISPR allows targeting bioweapons at specific individuals.
- slg 6y ago
  Thanks for the link to that video. I don't have the time to watch it now, but I will come back to it later. Although on the surface, specifically targeted bio-engineered weapons seems like a silly fear for most us when bullets are so cheap. If someone wants me dead, I don't think any difficulty accessing my genome is going to be what stops them.
  - chiph 6y ago
    Unless they want your demise attributable to "natural causes" Yeah, no one is going to go to all this trouble for some schmoe from the middle of nowhere. But imagine something like regime change as a motivation.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    The choice of murder weapon obviously has more to it than whether bullets are available. The US has the most guns amongst its citizenry than any other on the planet yet a large percentage of homicides there are stabbings. Availability, ease of use, likelihood of success/failure, and ability to be detected prior to and hence defended from, and for it to be detected after the act (who wants to be caught?) would all be considerations that may make it far more viable and attractive as a method, let alone the cost - bullets may be cheap but guns aren't.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amINeolib 6y ago
I'd be most curious if there is DNA that can predict if you are susceptible to marketing/propaganda. Easy to figure out- line up anyone who accessed the site with an Apple product and do data science/machine learning on those users.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The DNA records aren't the type that can be used to clone you, or frame you with some kind of non-existent DNA copying machine. They are autosomal records. (or similar genealogical, or non-medical, types) The people spinning fantastic fairytales about how the jackbooted thug of big brother is going to crush your throat probably don't even know what autosomal means and no amount of eduction will convince them. I encourage everyone to submit their Autosomal DNA to public databases. You may bring closure to someone who has been or known a victim of a horrific crime and there is no risk to you. You have at least one reply about insurance companies using this information to screw you. 1. This type of information is practically useless, actuarially, and 2. It has been illegal for them to do so for many years.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > or frame you with some kind of non-existent DNA copying machine I can imagine the hacker swaps your name + account metadata on the data warehouse website with the DNA content of a murderer. Then you get a visit from the police just like you were being SWATted. The mismatch is only found if the police bother to verify by doing a fresh DNA comparison (which they might, but only if they can't convince you to admit guilt first).
  - mFixman 6y ago
    A hacker can swap my name + address with a murderer right now without access to my DNA. All of the hypotheticals in this thread (except for the CRISPR future superweapon) can happen right now without the need of a DNA leak: the US had an explicit system of racial discrimination encodes in the law until the mid 1960s without the need of 23AndMe. My insurer already has data about my genetic diseases and pre-conditions from blood tests I did as a baby. I want to be worried about the leak, but I really cannot think of any consequence that's not a crazy sci-fi hypothetical or something that can be done more easily without access to the DNA database.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > there is no risk to you. There is always risk. You probably don't see it yet just like only privacy-forward folks thought Facebook's encouragement to "share everything" publicly (circa 2007) foresaw the problems that would commit 10+ years later. The small benefit of closure to a stranger who has already dealt with the grief of loss is not worth it for me. It depends on your personal value system. > It has been illegal for them to do so for many years. Laws can change. Just like I always assume a company can screw me after I agree to a ToS (eg. through a pivot, an M&A, or a bankruptcy), I assume any law can change with enough societal acclimation. Also, laws are relative to where you are. If you try to visit another country, expect that they might have access to your leaked data. Hopefully you never want to work as a spy in the future.
mLuby 6y ago
Well, as a non-criminal thinking about it for a few seconds, various types of blackmail come to mind: - you are the biological parent of this person who's looking for you, and if you want to stay anonymous… - your husband isn't the father of his children, and if you don't want him to find out… (follow-up: both parents know but don't want the kids to.) - you've been living under someone else's identity or a fake name… - your ancestor was a slave-owner or Nazi or something and if you don't want the people you care about to know… - your sibling isn't actually a blood relative, and so now the inheritance is in question… These are all probably extremely rare cases, and were likely already known before or immediately after the test, but it's cheap to spam out the emails to see who's still trying to hide it. In a large enough population, it's still a worthwhile criminal enterprise. And their rarity makes them all the more vulnerable to blackmail. Where before it would have taken real legwork to find them, now it's just some data processing and emailing. A similar concept is like those annoying ads for semi-legal websites where you can look up someone's criminal history, there could be a similar thing to look up someone's biological records. There might be a dating app in there too: filter for infertility or rare diseases? There are plenty of other things, from the mundane to the exotic: - having your medical care made more expensive or being denied insurance. - being wrongly accused (and even convicted) because crime scene DNA was close to yours or a relative's. - hiring based on genetic factors as in Gattaca. - individually targeted attacks like the peach allergy from Parasite. And again, that's off the top of my head; criminals are much more creative. The key point that makes DNA (and other biometrics) even worse of a breach than credit cards or bank statements is it cannot be "reset."

by slg 6y ago

philmcc 6y ago

My hunch is that if this information is used against you, you'd never know. First scenario that comes to mind: The insurance company that gives you an extremely high quote because you come back as "high risk" from a 3rd party company that they use to vet applications, and that 3rd party company uses your genetic predisposition for a condition.

mej10 6y ago
For what it's worth, that is illegal in the USA at least. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act passed in 2008.
- sk5t 6y ago
  Which covers health insurance, not life insurance and others.
slg 6y ago
This requires the insurance company to be doing something illegal and for it to really cause damage all their competitors have to be doing it as well. If this ever becomes widespread, it would be quickly obvious when a large number of ostensibly healthy people are given quotes that match their genetic profile but not their medical history. I'm just not sure that is a reasonable fear.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  I am also extremely dubious of this risk. At least in the US, a conspiracy of this sort would require hundreds of potentially-disgruntled employees to resist getting rich from whistleblower rewards.
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Or half a dozen engineers building a new "AI-driven" risk evaluation service with nebulous inputs from their manager.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Except these don’t regularly turn up fraud. Wells Fargo kept it going for years. Bernie Madoff kept it going for years. People knew about both.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Mix the DNA info into a machine learning insura-bot and you'll never be able to extract the evidence.
- site-packages1 6y ago
  I think insurance companies aren't above doing anything illegal, especially if it can not insure you/drive you away with a high quote if it saves them many years and millions and millions of dollars covering someone's care for Huntington's or chemo for breast cancer or some other terrible disease for which someone is genetically predisposed. The punishment for violations of the Genetic Information NonDiscrimination Act can be up to a million dollars in fines and some jail time. It is exceedingly rare for corporate officers to go to jail for acts of corporations, so likely violations would simply be fines. Cancer is expensive to cover (less so for insurance companies working with hospitals, much more for you and I), and the fines are relatively small, with the chance of jail time exceedingly small. I am unaware of anyone who has been prosecuted under this Act at all. I did a cursory search and didn't see anything. The forgoing leads me to believe that like many crimes that have low rates of prosecution and relatively small fines, it would probably make sense for a corporate board (or series of employees acting under mutual light peer pressure) to use DNA information as an input into their actuarial tables. Additionally, it would be difficult to spot clusters of people who are otherwise healthy with high insurance quotes. Even if you had the actual insurance quotes, getting peoples' medical information, especially in bulk, is extremely difficult because the aggregators of such information are typically bound by HIPAA. All that to say, I think this is an extremely reasonable concerned and I would be shocked if companies didn't already use DNA information in some form, even if that form is as some input to a machine learning model, but I'll demurr on that subject because I know little about it.

MattGaiser 6y ago

I may be one of the people who lost DNA in this breach. I am not currently worried about anything, but I also know that I don’t know everything DNA can be used for. My greatest concern consists of things some smart crook might think of doing. While a reputable company might not use the DNA for fear of getting sued, they might use a crappy contractor who does not care. Banks care about information security and take it seriously. They use a crappy contractor called Equifax which doesn’t.

andrewem 6y ago
This is a side note about your example, but you say "Banks care about information security and take it seriously. They use a crappy contractor called Equifax which doesn’t." If banks send important information to a contractor which they're unable to verify takes information security seriously, then it's hard to see how the banks can be said to be taking it seriously.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  They take it seriously until the liability shield of contracts and separate corporate entities takes over.
soulofmischief 6y ago
Think bigger. Insurance. Loans. Financial predation. The right to bear arms. Social stigma created by incumbent politicians wishing to divide their people over meaningless differences.

bagacrap 6y ago

this presentation outlines the kind of terrible attacks that could be based on your DNA in the near future https://youtu.be/HKQDSgBHPfY https://youtu.be/HKQDSgBHPfY tldr, CRISPR allows targeting bioweapons at specific individuals.

slg 6y ago
Thanks for the link to that video. I don't have the time to watch it now, but I will come back to it later. Although on the surface, specifically targeted bio-engineered weapons seems like a silly fear for most us when bullets are so cheap. If someone wants me dead, I don't think any difficulty accessing my genome is going to be what stops them.
- chiph 6y ago
  Unless they want your demise attributable to "natural causes" Yeah, no one is going to go to all this trouble for some schmoe from the middle of nowhere. But imagine something like regime change as a motivation.
- brigandish 6y ago
  The choice of murder weapon obviously has more to it than whether bullets are available. The US has the most guns amongst its citizenry than any other on the planet yet a large percentage of homicides there are stabbings. Availability, ease of use, likelihood of success/failure, and ability to be detected prior to and hence defended from, and for it to be detected after the act (who wants to be caught?) would all be considerations that may make it far more viable and attractive as a method, let alone the cost - bullets may be cheap but guns aren't.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

amINeolib 6y ago

I'd be most curious if there is DNA that can predict if you are susceptible to marketing/propaganda. Easy to figure out- line up anyone who accessed the site with an Apple product and do data science/machine learning on those users.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The DNA records aren't the type that can be used to clone you, or frame you with some kind of non-existent DNA copying machine. They are autosomal records. (or similar genealogical, or non-medical, types) The people spinning fantastic fairytales about how the jackbooted thug of big brother is going to crush your throat probably don't even know what autosomal means and no amount of eduction will convince them. I encourage everyone to submit their Autosomal DNA to public databases. You may bring closure to someone who has been or known a victim of a horrific crime and there is no risk to you. You have at least one reply about insurance companies using this information to screw you. 1. This type of information is practically useless, actuarially, and 2. It has been illegal for them to do so for many years.

thephyber 6y ago
> or frame you with some kind of non-existent DNA copying machine I can imagine the hacker swaps your name + account metadata on the data warehouse website with the DNA content of a murderer. Then you get a visit from the police just like you were being SWATted. The mismatch is only found if the police bother to verify by doing a fresh DNA comparison (which they might, but only if they can't convince you to admit guilt first).
- mFixman 6y ago
  A hacker can swap my name + address with a murderer right now without access to my DNA. All of the hypotheticals in this thread (except for the CRISPR future superweapon) can happen right now without the need of a DNA leak: the US had an explicit system of racial discrimination encodes in the law until the mid 1960s without the need of 23AndMe. My insurer already has data about my genetic diseases and pre-conditions from blood tests I did as a baby. I want to be worried about the leak, but I really cannot think of any consequence that's not a crazy sci-fi hypothetical or something that can be done more easily without access to the DNA database.
thephyber 6y ago
> there is no risk to you. There is always risk. You probably don't see it yet just like only privacy-forward folks thought Facebook's encouragement to "share everything" publicly (circa 2007) foresaw the problems that would commit 10+ years later. The small benefit of closure to a stranger who has already dealt with the grief of loss is not worth it for me. It depends on your personal value system. > It has been illegal for them to do so for many years. Laws can change. Just like I always assume a company can screw me after I agree to a ToS (eg. through a pivot, an M&A, or a bankruptcy), I assume any law can change with enough societal acclimation. Also, laws are relative to where you are. If you try to visit another country, expect that they might have access to your leaked data. Hopefully you never want to work as a spy in the future.

mLuby 6y ago

Well, as a non-criminal thinking about it for a few seconds, various types of blackmail come to mind: - you are the biological parent of this person who's looking for you, and if you want to stay anonymous… - your husband isn't the father of his children, and if you don't want him to find out… (follow-up: both parents know but don't want the kids to.) - you've been living under someone else's identity or a fake name… - your ancestor was a slave-owner or Nazi or something and if you don't want the people you care about to know… - your sibling isn't actually a blood relative, and so now the inheritance is in question… These are all probably extremely rare cases, and were likely already known before or immediately after the test, but it's cheap to spam out the emails to see who's still trying to hide it. In a large enough population, it's still a worthwhile criminal enterprise. And their rarity makes them all the more vulnerable to blackmail. Where before it would have taken real legwork to find them, now it's just some data processing and emailing. A similar concept is like those annoying ads for semi-legal websites where you can look up someone's criminal history, there could be a similar thing to look up someone's biological records. There might be a dating app in there too: filter for infertility or rare diseases? There are plenty of other things, from the mundane to the exotic: - having your medical care made more expensive or being denied insurance. - being wrongly accused (and even convicted) because crime scene DNA was close to yours or a relative's. - hiring based on genetic factors as in Gattaca. - individually targeted attacks like the peach allergy from Parasite. And again, that's off the top of my head; criminals are much more creative. The key point that makes DNA (and other biometrics) even worse of a breach than credit cards or bank statements is it cannot be "reset."