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Covid testing firm ‘selling swabs carrying customers’ DNA’ to third parties
- b3nji 5y agoJust wait until we find out what the government, via their designated companies have been doing with our DNA off the back of the swabs
- aww_dang 5y agoI remember when this was a conspiracy theory.
- mrozbarry 5y agoI can't find a definitive start, but essentially as soon as samples were being tested, it was conspiracy theory time. Even if it's not for DNA, I can assure you the swabs have many conspiracy theories behind them. (Credentials: my wife is really into conspiracy theories)
- simion314 5y agoSome might have been super smart and installed an extension to autoclick on EULA/Consent (because they hate transparency on tracking).
- api 5y agoSurveillance capitalism has gone way beyond the craziest fever dreams of 1990s shortwave radio conspiracy wackos. The thing they never would have predicted was that nobody had to round everyone up into camps or abduct them in the night. People would willingly rush to instrument themselves and give away all their privacy for convenience and cute emojis, and when a story like this came out they’d shrug. A while back a friend and I had just read something about all those nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s. He asked what “the fuck were they thinking?” thing we are doing today. I immediately answered: total surveillance with no regulation or oversight. As I’ve said before: we just (in my opinion) had an attempted fascist coup. The next one won’t be so incompetent and will have a far smarter and slicker demagogue behind it.
- livinginfear 5y ago> As I’ve said before: we just (in my opinion) had an attempted fascist coup.... What on earth are you talking about? What relevance does this political commentary have to the topic at hand?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoFacism, not Nazism "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" "Corporatism became one of the main tenets of fascism in Benito Mussolini's fascist regime"
- Proven 5y ago
- mantas 5y agoBiden is a very low bar for “won’t be so incompetent”. Wonder what will next US presidential elections look like…
- l34jtlkjl 5y ago
- aww_dang 5y agoI feel that the partisan takes generally miss the larger picture.
- api 5y agoTo get past the partisanship all you have to do is change the jackets. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, rallied the extreme left with dog whistles and charged divisive rhetoric, and then had lost to a fairly moderate Republican in 2020. Before the election can be certified she gives a speech to a mob of angry protestors telling them to march to the capitol. Embedded among them are actual paramilitary and militia groups with strong extreme-left ideologies. The protestors go full riot, start fights, bludgeon a police officer to death with the American flag, march into the capitol, and start ransacking the place. Many of them are wearing shirts with hammers and sickles on them, "Lenin was right," "Camp gulag," etc. A number of them are dressed in all black and are seen climbing around with zip ties calling the names of various congress members and senators. They erect a gallows out front and are chanting things like "hang Mitch McConnel!" Clinton is reported by numerous witnesses to be watching the events on TV while she calls and threatens officials in states where her opponent won by a narrow margin, pushing them to overturn the results. She also has a team of attorneys working on tactics to overturn the election. She refuses to give a speech to call off the riot for hours and hours until the national guard shows up to clear the building. Even after that she refuses to concede the election. I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics. I brought it up to argue for the risk posed by complete loss of privacy. We are creating a system of total surveillance that will be available to whatever much worse regime might take power in the future. If the thought of right-wing populist authoritarians is fine with you, imagine instead that it's an American Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. That is not out of the question either if the same people backing right wing populism become disillusioned with it and flip to left wing populism instead. Stranger things have happened. For the record that could be every bit as awful as a right wing authoritarian, especially with the kind of surveillance powers they will be able to seize and mobilize. People who think there's nothing wrong with this panopticon we're building should convert to Islam and move to Xinjiang province.
- rootsudo 5y agoLife imitates art? But Same. Full circle.
- postsantum 5y agoI feel like this phrase will be the motto of this year
- l34jtlkjl 5y ago
- amelius 5y agoThese stupid users probably didn't read the EULA. /s
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoLet's be honest, if you had to sign a EULA and accept the T&Cs for being born, we'd probably go extinct.
- bjt2n3904 5y agoProbably because they were told they'll lose their jobs if they don't comply. (Hey, they were given a choice! They chose this voluntarily!) /s /s /s
- amcoastal 5y ago
- ficklepickle 5y agoSome fairly glaring typos: - 4th paragraph, "4,876 privacy policy" should be "4,876 page privacy policy". - 6th paragraph, "form of" should be "firm or". I emailed them so hopefully they fix it. I tend to get hyper-focused on the typos and can't finish the article, strange as it may sound.
- mhoad 5y agoThat sounds pretty debilitating and frustrating. Have you always been like that? Genuinely curious
- shusaku 5y agoThe fact that the privacy policy is 4,876 pages also feels like it can’t be true. The surrounding typos make me worry the number itself is wrong. I mean how much money would you have to pay a law firm to write you a policy that’s 5000 pages long?
- runnerup 5y agoSomeone paid an actor to read the terms of service for amazon kindle and posted the recording to Youtube. It took the actor just shy of 9 hours to read the document: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5zhgo1/it_takes_8_hours_59_minutes_to_read_amazon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5zhgo1/it_takes_8_h... It included the "Apache 2.0 License, (Full Text)" over 10 separate times.
- ceejayoz 5y agoIt's probably 4,876 words, not pages. That'd be excessive even by privacy policy standards.
- mcculley 5y agoIn the article there is a quote, “There is no personal data more sensitive than our DNA.“ This seems a bogus assertion to me. I can imagine many diagnostic health test results that would be more sensitive to leak than DNA (e.g., STD and drug tests). DNA sequencing is eventually going to be so cheap and ubiquitous that it will happen to everyone anyway. Having published my own results (https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/ https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/), I really don’t buy into the idea that DNA is the most personal data that can be leaked. (Nevertheless, there should be more obvious warnings to customers about how their data will be monetized.) Edit: I think I failed to make clear that while I agree that DNA is "personal" data, I don't think it is the most "sensitive" personal data. If I had an identical twin and he released his DNA, I would not care. If I had syphilis and my test results were leaked, I would be upset about that.
- endisneigh 5y agoCan STD and drug tests be disambiguated back to the person without attached PII? It seems that DNA is inherently the most personal data imaginable.
- mcculley 5y agoThose swabs have identity attached to them already.
- taneq 5y ago> DNA sequencing is eventually going to be so cheap and ubiquitous that it will happen to everyone anyway. Photography is so cheap and ubiquitous that it happens to everyone anyway. That still doesn't mean it's OK for you to sell photos of me in a private setting without my permission. It's nice that you've chosen to publish your own genome but I bet you'd feel a little different if someone else had published it without your consent.
- mcculley 5y ago
- Proven 5y ago
- ajxs 5y agoI've always been extremely pessimistic regarding the slow erosion of rights in a digital world that's increasingly controlled by players too big to regulate. Yet why am I always so shocked when things like this happen? If you asked me at any point in the past whether I think things are going to get better, or worse, I would unequivocally have said the latter? Yet when things do get worse in some totally foreseeable but awful way, I'm inexplicably shocked and appalled. Maybe for all of my pessimism, my imagination for calamity is actually terrible.
- sofixa 5y agoWhat do Covid tests by a pharmaceutical-ish company have to do with "digital world controlled by players too big to regulate"?
- ajxs 5y agoI was speaking very generally. I think that my concerns regarding the regulation of individual privacy in the digital realm, and my concerns about the regulation of the major players in 'surveillance capitalism' is shared by many. The brokering of PII is such a large, and interconnected business. I would like control over who has access to my medical data, my DNA included.
- aww_dang 5y agoIs it capitalism or corporatism? What's free-market about being compelled by the state to use these services? https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... Pick any major tech platform and you'll find similar connections. The CCP has their own platforms, just like Russia has their own. Digital ID, pushed by WEF isn't being promoted by the free-market. It is better described as corporatism. Hopefully this more accurate terminology will help diffuse the more contentious implications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab#:~:text=Schwab%20as%20publisher,state%20governance%20systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab#:~:text=Schwab%20....
- jfim 5y agoI wonder who would be the actual buyer of those swabs and why they would buy them.
- Jach 5y agoI'm sure there are innocent scientific pursuits that benefit from more data samples, even without other data to correlate to. Then there's always government agencies interested in labeled name-DNA pairs which can be used to find criminals, or for general mass tracking (though that'd be a poor and error-prone way to do so).
- eckesicle 5y agoWell I, and my family took several tests with this firm - and I am very upset about this. I will be speaking to a barrister today or on Monday to explore what, if any, remedies we can seek over this in court. Please if anyone could recommend a London-based barrister who specialises in this sort of matter by DM or in reply that would be much appreciated.
- te_chris 5y agoI used them once as there was no one else who’d give us a rapid test in time. Have emailed their support. Curious to see the answer. Barrister would be the heavy option, but complaints to the ICO and health authorities also an option.
- shusaku 5y agoBetter to send them an email than a real letter in the post, otherwise they could sell the dna on the stamp.
- Terry_Roll 5y agoStamps are self adhesive now, for this reason and others.
- joelbondurant0 5y ago
- rob_c 5y ago
- ben_w 5y agoWhy would someone be branded a conspiracy theorist for hiring a legal representative for what looks at first glance like a straightforward violation of the specific + informed + non-coerced consent requirement of GDPR with regard to the processing of personal data? One which is in the news because it is actively under investigation by the authorities?
- 14 5y agoAnd suddenly the conspiracy theorist is not so crazy once again. This is a pretty scummy thing to do an jeopardizes future pandemic testing as people will feel they are being lied to and won’t trust testing. But by the. I suspect it won’t matter. They will have so many DNA samples that even if you are a slight relative they will be able to figure out who you are from a unknown sample of DNA.
- rob_c 5y agoYep. The most prolific conspiracies have always had an unfortunate nugget of truth behind them. "They're using it to track us". Or "Its to make a database to remove our freedoms" claims don't looks crazy at first glance. At the some time I'm now glad biology had such a reproducibility problem, they probably can't identify a human strand from a rat in most "biotech" start ups I reckon...
- registeredcorn 5y agoI like to think of the reproducibility problem as a sort of modern Tower of Babel. It's obviously not a perfectly 1:1, but interesting similarities to be sure.
- rob_c 5y agoThis comes as a surprise to people? Companies and other large groups have been able to get away effectively illegal activities in the name of covid for over 2 years already... Don't get me wrong I prefer that the righteous cross of public indignation is changing to target the fat cats who exploited this chaos, but frankly this is the same "ban the plastic straw" "use extra face masks in non workable settings" hypocrisy from the last 2 years. If this company said doing this would improve vaccines 2 years ago there's a certain large group of public opinion that would have given this cart blanche regardless of the damage it could/will do...
- yread 5y agoYou can't ask for (nor give) a consent that broad: "use my dna for whatever research you want by whoever". Having been involved a bit with asking for informed consent in a hospital, it's sooo difficult to design a specific- and useful-enough consent form for legitimate not-for-profit medical research. I hope these jokers go to prison for a long time.
- pas 5y agodon't hold your breath. ex-doctor the OG antivax Wakefield committed malpractice by not getting informed consent to do all kinds of tests on autistic children, and he's free as ever. :/
- ben_w 5y agoAye, and that sucks, but (1) he did his thing before the Data Protection Act 1998 let alone GDPR, and (2) violations of medical consent are different from and (IMO as a generalisation) much more serious than violations of data processing consent. Not sure what laws he might have violated, though I think he would be breaking one if he calls himself “doctor” at this point?
- pas 5y agoHe conducted research for money. This involved ~7 children spending 1 week in a hospital. The children were young (mean age 6) and some had severe autism, so they had to be sedated, held down by adults, etc. His "informed consent" form does not describe the risks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc&t=1h7m17s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc&t=1h7m17s (Where was the IRB during all this? Good question.)
- ben_w 5y agoI was already in agreement that he sucks, but that doesn’t actually tell me he committed an offence under section Foo of the Perfectly Sensible Yet Obscure Medical Consent Act 1869 or whatever, so I don’t know if legally speaking he ought to have been locked up.
- zivkovicp 5y agoLet's not kid ourselves, we _all_ saw this coming a mile away. Unfortunately. :(
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoYet, it seems most who raised an alarm were told to be quiet and sit down.
- zivkovicp 5y agoSomething something blissful ignorance...
- aww_dang 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127082
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoThat is a horribly relevant thread.
- aww_dang 5y agoWe've gained information and further confirmation of this specific issue. The underlying patterns which precipitated that thread continue.
- acuozzo 5y agoHave you tried to message that guy? I'd love to read his response.
- aww_dang 5y agoI'm not sure what I would say to him. Went down to negative three on that one, which is about par for the course here. Imagine messaging everyone. I don't have the time and things would continue as usual regardless.
- tunap 5y agoI recently obtained an At-Home Covid test that stated it was 'the 1st ever app-assisted test' and using the app was compulsory. The instruction pamphlets were entirely focused on how to install and use the app and not a single mention of how to read the results beyond "removing human interpretation errors". Turns out, the stick produced TWO control lines(another 1st ever) and a third line would indicate a positive result. I dug up the ghosted replies to several deleted Reddit & Twitter posts to find the information to deduce the results... after fretting about my "positive" result. The manufacturer's primary concern was clearly stated in the included pamphlets, IMO: data collection.
- jfk13 5y agoWhere did you obtain such a test, if you don't mind sharing that detail? Did you know what you'd be getting, or did the "app-assisted" aspect come as a surprise (which is how it sounds)?
- tunap 5y agoI received it from work. I had no idea it used an app. If I had known, I would have sought out another kit. Instead of installing the apkx(bundle?), I did some research and found the ghosted posts' comments where other confused users contacted the company directly and shared their findings, verifying two lines = negative. edit:grammar
- registeredcorn 5y agoIf you are okay with it, please share the name of this testing company. Not specifically to "name and shame" but instead, so others can avoid using them.
- tunap 5y agoI have no problem shaming such an actor, it is the latest from BD Veritor. https://bdveritor.bd.com/en-us https://bdveritor.bd.com/en-us
- mvc 5y agoOh look who sponsored the committee on covid testing. Seems like the government welcomed these people with open arms https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/covid-testing-company-sponsored-parliamentary-group-which-called-for-additional-testing-requirements https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/covid-testing-comp... Which cabinet member has got a friend on the board.
- rob_c 5y agoAnd guess who will be justifying the slap on the wrist fines because "emergency" and giving them effective clean slate moving forward.
- callamdelaney 5y agoCovid testing policies influenced by.. covid testing companies. 'Covid experts' working for companies with similar interests?
- DoingIsLearning 5y agoIf proven unlawful which it most likely is at face value, will the companies who received samples from Cignpost both destroy the samples and any data or derivative data associated with this? If not then the crime pays off, irrespective of how stern the watchdog is.
- bencollier49 5y agoI wonder. Perhaps they're overseas, in places like China.
- bjt2n3904 5y ago
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoPrivate company sell customer data cause no regulation Blame 'totalitarian' government
- l34jtlkjl 5y ago
- mellosouls 5y ago(2021) This report is actually 3 months old, it would be useful to know if there have been updates.
- rob_c 5y agoProbably not, the interest follows public outrage which wasn't there in 2021 because how dare you speak the word "endemic"...
- Claude_Shannon 5y agoAnd this is one of the reason why people will be afraid to test themselves. While many are just anti-vaxxers or Covid denialists, you can't argue that the system hadn't done its' best to cultivate these issues.
- prepend 5y agoThis is a really common practice and I hate it. The leftover biological material after a text (blood, urine, whatever) is considered waste and legal to sell in most US states. This used to not mean anything because no one wanted random blood. But now with dna so cheap, those samples can be sequenced and stored in a bio bank. They are “de-identified” from the lab info, but dna can’t be truly deidentified because it’s dna. I don’t know how much money it makes for the labs, but it’s scary to me. I’ve never been able to opt out of this process and there’s no privacy policy for LabCorp or Qwest or major labs that includes protections for individuals biomaterial being used beyond the paid for test. Here’s some more info on human bio banks, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118708/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118708/
- wildzzz 5y agoIn college, I signed up for a medical test where you got $20 for filling out a massive questionnaire about health, habits, family, just about everything you'd need to build a massive medical background. We got another $20 when we showed up to spit in a vial for DNA sequencing. I don't think we ever provided names or addresses but I'm sure you could build a pretty complete profile.
- threatripper 5y ago> They are “de-identified” from the lab info, but dna can’t be truly deidentified because it’s dna. DNA is not just random numbers. You can reconstruct the whole family tree from just DNA samples. With DNA samples of the whole population we could reconstruct the family tree of the whole nation alive and even some generations back. Add in some DNA samples associated with medical records and you can use this to predict the probability genetic disorders. The more data points you can connect to this structure the less anonymous it becomes. The key is to get DNA from a majority of the population to close the gaps in your relationship network.
- captainredbeard 5y agoThen what?
- graderjs 5y agoYep, well, we all knew that was going to happen... Taking a lighter note for a moment: it will be funny when the mass DNA data identifies the humanoid aliens and mutants living among us ;) ;p xx :p
- alephnil 5y agoEven if I don't consent to this, it is sufficient that some of my relatives do so to expose information about me. Thus individuals should not even be allowed to give such general consent, as they cannot possible give consent only for themselves.
- JustCusImPrnoid 5y ago
- verisimi 5y agoI don't think conspiracy theorists are surprised about this turn of events.
- registeredcorn 5y agoI mean, sure, but you hardly have to believe that JFK was killed by mobsters to think, "I bet a lot of companies are going to take advantage of a worldwide, multi-year panic."
- ceejayoz 5y agoConspiracy theorists are never surprised. That's the deal. Any information can be effortlessly be turned to support or expand the theory. The government could announce we've been in contact with aliens since the 1950s, and conspiracists would go "see! but they're not telling you <new variant on theory>!"
- richardfey 5y ago> When buying tests, customers were asked to tick a box agreeing to a 4,876 [sic] privacy policy which links to a separate document outlining the research programme, The Sunday Times reported. This needs to change.
- dane-pgp 5y agoThe simple non-serious solution to this is for governments to require that before a user can consent to a legal "agreement" (like a privacy policy, or an EULA) they have to have it read to them, live, by a lawyer. At 150 words per minute, that agreement would have taken half an hour to read, which lawyers would charge at least £50 for.
- verisimi 5y agoThe problem here is that it sold the DNA to third parties. The government 'data watchdog' appears to be stepping in to stop this overt failure. Of course, all the testing agencies are collecting DNA. The records will be somewhere. Do we think that government agencies will be able to access these? Will the NHS? Will government access even be stated in the agreements that they signed to be 'government-approved'? Will the data be available to other companies down the line for research? Or when they are bought up by a big corporation? The point is that this is another erosion of privacy, another cat is out of the bag. It is all very foreseeable. Once we sanction the collection of private information, eg DNA for health! to prevent child abuse! to stop terrorism! the over-reach is never withdrawn. Government access to your dna, online record, etc, etc - becomes the new normal. All while the actions of the government are ever more hidden - eg secret courts, collection of data, etc In every instance of privacy erosion, a plausibly valid excuse is supplied by the government. But it is a one-way street. Why we continuously accept government justifications of excessive over-reach amazes me. But that we do in general (I don't!) destroys privacy for everyone.
- roneoo 5y ago> Of course, all the testing agencies are collecting DNA. Source please!
- xwowsersx 5y agoIs there legislation in either the US or UK (or both) that prevents a testing lab from analyzing my DNA from a swab provided for the purpose of a Covid (or other) test? I had never thought about this, but it seems alarming, given that my identification is obviously associated with the swab, that a lab could unilaterally decide to analyze my DNA...
- jdrc 5y ago> no personal data more sensitive than our DNA Personhood is in the brain, the most personal data is our thoughts. Dna is everywhere, in every tissue, in relatives, in other people, it s hardly the most personal thing We are all 2.5 DNA degrees of separation from each other in here. Panicking over having some of it sampled doesn't make a lot of sense
- t0suj4 5y agoExcept now they have it nicely paired with your medical records. Now any match will have a great chance to come up with complete medical history including everything else those data can be paired with.
- jdrc 5y ago... and? (I' m i europe)
- flower-giraffe 5y agoAnd passport number, home address and date of birth.
- pstuart 5y agoI could be wrong, but it seems the real worry about DNA being known is that one could be discriminated against for health care if one was prone to disease. That hasn't happened yet. I did my DNA test with 23andMe and did not hide my identity as I figured such a fear is not likely to play out in my lifetime. I also have not committed any crimes worthy of forensics (yes, I drive over the speed limit and smoked dope when it wasn't legal but otherwise a good boy).
- mzs 5y agoThis is just blog spam from this story back from Nov, there is nothing new here, right? https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/testing-firm-can-profit-from-sale-of-covid-swabs-w6vkb2f2f https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/testing-firm-can-profit-f... >This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Cignpost Diagnostics (November 14, 2021)
- zuminator 5y agoQuestion: In the US, would it be possible to patent/copyright/trademark one's own DNA, and irrevocably transfer exclusive rights to a trust for which the DNA donor is the sole trustee? Then the donor would no longer have the legal ability to accidentally confer IP rights to their DNA to a third party via contact, and any company which tried to financially exploit the DNA could be sued by the trust. Doubtless the infringing company would then commence against the donor for fraudulent misrepresentation (for entering into a contract without authority to do so) but then at least the fight would be had over money, and not over one's literal birthright. Or is the trust idea entirely without merit?
- gruez 5y agopatent: unless you think you yourself are a novel invention, no. copyright: I doubt DNA counts as a "creative work". Also if it does count as work, the actual owner would be your parents, not you. You didn't create yourself, after all. trademark: unless you're using your DNA in commerce (ie. using it as part of a brand), no.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> patent: unless you think you yourself are a novel invention, no. Even if you are, you aren't the inventor.
- zuminator 5y agoAh, I see. I thought I remembered people's DNA sequences getting patented but I now see this practice was disallowed about 10 years ago in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc (2013). Thanks.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> In the US, would it be possible to patent/copyright/trademark one's own DNA No.
- l34jtlkjl 5y ago
- dekhn 5y agoafter reading the article I see that they haven't started selling anything yet (title clickbait) and customers willingly signed a consent form (important detail).
- lkjljkll 5y ago
- lkjljkll 5y ago
- Terry_Roll 5y agoCovid ticks so many boxes, I wonder how many suspected criminals or blood relations of criminals where directed to testing stations to collect DNA?
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIf you didn't do anything wrong why do you care if they're selling your DNA? Gattica was such a good movie...
- powerapple 5y agoWhen I took the test in Zurich Airport, I thought the same. It was saliva test, the same as any DNA test, then they scan our passports, very worrying.
- guilhas 5y agoClassic crackpot conspiracy theory that was right after all, must be a record this year As for the motivations, the government forced everyone having these tests. In hundreds of different companies. They knew this was bound to happened, and they wanted it, because they don't want China to have genome sequencing research edge as authoritarian countries have less red tape to collect and experiment their people medical data, that would give them scientific and economic advantage
- more_corn 5y ago
- mleonhard 5y agoAmerican Red Cross also keeps blood donor DNA for "medical research" [0]. [0] https://www.redcrossblood.org/content/dam/redcrossblood/controlled-documents/rapidpass/15.4.ltr408_Possible_Use_04152021.pdf https://www.redcrossblood.org/content/dam/redcrossblood/cont...