3 ms·
I have never heard that concern before ever, in all of my life, a not insignificant portion of which has been in privacy minded communities that care very much
by lucubratory 3y ago
I have never heard that concern before ever, in all of my life, a not insignificant portion of which has been in privacy minded communities that care very much about genetic privacy. The major concerns are:
1. Government surveillance, so that the government can take a sample from anywhere you've ever been and tie you directly to that location, like having cops constantly monitoring a GPS tracker on you. The government does this now through long range scanning, and there's plenty of puff pieces about how it's used to find serial killers and rapists, not much written about the dangers of parallel construction and unethical surveillance of political opposition. Genetic privacy prevents these abuses.
2. Privatised eugenics programs. Insurers denying or granting coverage and employers hiring or firing based on genetics is part of it, but genetic screening as an input to embryo selection is also being done all the time by modern eugenicists, and I'm not talking about disease prevention. Some of these people want "charities" which attempt to sterilise as many people as they can who they consider to be undesirable, and if they had access to genetic data it would make that a lot easier. Genetic privacy prevents these abuses.
I don't even know where you got the idea that genetic privacy advocates are worried that a company will look at their genes and make a really profitable drug out of that process somehow. Was this maybe a movie or videogame that you watched some time? Or misremembering/misinterpreting the real practice of pharmaceutical companies going into indigenous communities, using their knowledge of which plants and animals have medicinal properties, then patenting the medicines they only found based on that indigenous knowledge without any of the value from that transaction going to the people who actually discovered and relayed the information?