6 ms·

If this tech becomes widespread and cheap, what are the privacy implications of being able to sequence human DNA floating in the air in any public or private sp

If this tech becomes widespread and cheap, what are the privacy implications of being able to sequence human DNA floating in the air in any public or private space? It feels like a classic 'can we/should we' problem.

blankx32 1y ago
Exactly my thoughts, but once the cat is out of the bag
- fecal_henge 1y ago
  ..then there is cat DNA left inside the bag?
cypherpunks01 1y ago
Surely the police will start mass collection after the technology is commercialized, to solve theoretical crimes. And then claim that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, since you freely decided to leave the house and knowingly start shedding DNA in public.
- robwwilliams 1y ago
  This is NOT new tech. As old at least as generating sequence from low-copy number and fragment fossil specimens. This “news” is just a tweak and PR piece. Qualeed explains why this is a non-issue for forensics.
arddcootvt178 1y ago
Internet of Smells The world is wired. Is bathed in wi-fi waves. It is also full of smell. Eve and Adam meet at a party. Both are good looking, the kind which is so clean that it looks almost puppet like. When Adam sees Eve and approaches her, Eve is at first welcoming. Her sniffer ring sends her a message. (The sniffer ring is just a ring with a feather moving somehow between a dog tail and a butterfly wing. It is of course connected to the wired/wifi network.) The message reads: "Adam has a very bad form of cancer. Is not good genetic material to mate with". As the polite behaviour rules dictate, Eve forwards the notice to Adam, maybe as a visual message, or as a message which appears on his health wristband, then she moves away, looking for other interesting people. Adam is only mildly concerned. He contacts, privately, his internet+health insurance provider and files a bug request. Then he goes along with the party. The next scene happens somewhere far, visible from the external conditions (like for example it is day there, while at the party place was night) and from the people in this scene (for example while Adam and Eve might be porcelaine figures, maybe blonds, or maybe japonese, the guys in the new scene are more like indians or pakistani.) So these are a bunch of Mechanical Turks in a internet cafe like place in India (for example). They receive Adam's bug ticket. We can see one of them, or several doing various stuff on their not so modern computers, but one of them opens on his screen Adam's request. We can see that the screen has two windows open, one is a REPL Lisp window, the other is a molecular simulation. (This is a hook for a technical audience, important as any hacker movie screenshot.) On the Lisp REPL there is an error message. The Mechanical Turk fixes it, then runs a molecular simulation. It works. He then opens a smell convertor. (Variant, he opens "Nozzle", which is just like Google page visually, he searches for a RNA like word, then he hits enter.) Job done. The third scene is Adam bedroom. He sleeps, not at all concerned, something between a puppet and a child in his bed. Travelling to a detail in his room, which looks alike the sniffer ring, only that it is a wifi router with a feather. Lights flicker and the feather begins to swosh. Travelling to the health bracelet of Adam. Shows: "Bug request solved. Status: healty". The night is quiet and peaceful. The sunrise begins. Adam dreams something nice. End.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  This was a good read.
checker659 1y ago
Surely it should be possible to spoof presence as well. Non-repudiation is not possible with this alone.
polishdude20 1y ago
Yeah at what point do we look back at this type of tech and say "the researchers surely knew this was going to be used in a bad way" and then blame them for it? Like, I get it. The argument that "maybe the tech will be used for good" is an easy one to make. But given how tech is being used more and more for bad these days, surely it's harder to make that moral argument to justify this continued research? Just because you can come up with one or two good reasons for the tech to exist, doesn't mean you get to ignore the overwhelming amount of reasons it shouldn't.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
About the same as being able to sequence dna left on a doorknob
BurningFrog 1y ago
We're already filmed by several cameras any time we're out in public. We're also tracked by our phones, unless we turn them off. Privacy of what places you visit is already pretty much dead. We're the last generation who lived like that. I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that it is, and we have to adapt.
- lazide 1y ago
  Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even.
  - RunningDroid 1y ago
    > Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even. For anyone wondering how this works: the cellular modem is a separate general-purpose computer that runs code from the manufacturer and the service provider, the only thing needed to allow tracking a phone that's off is circuitry to allow the modem to draw power independent of the rest of the phone.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Another good reason to prefer phones with physical switches to cut off the radios. Or removable batteries. Or both. I guess a faraday pouch might be helpful, but I recall reading these aren't really as effective as many people believe.
      - lazide 1y ago
        I’ve had an iPhone receive a call inside a locked steel 50 cal ammo can. No clue how that is possible, but it happened. I guess the gasket let enough EM through? Amusingly, crumpled aluminum foil seems to have a better track record.
        quesera 1y ago
        Planar surfaces do not attenuate as well as irregular surfaces. Same principle applies in the visual spectrum.
qualeed 1y ago
Even as a big privacy advocate, I don't see much reason to be especially concerned. The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking. Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do. There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could. It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.
- rvnx 1y ago
  You can clone fingerprint like here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30623611 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30623611 Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real. Same for DNA then.
  - qualeed 1y ago
    >Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real. >Same for DNA then. There's a world of difference between cloning a fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like fluids), and this technology. The air might carry the particulates to areas never traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints. Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling to a different city could imply that thousands of people have gone to a city they never went to before. Not happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA. The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless for court, and more easily game-able than any other biometric by a lot. To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
    - 1y ago
currymj 1y ago
everyone already leaves DNA everywhere, so it doesn’t seem like a step change. genetic privacy is a good thing but is utterly artificial, we have to create it if we want it.
deadbabe 1y ago
Life is too short. There is a narrow window in life, if any, when you will probably care about this. As a child, you won't care. As an elderly person on their way out, you also won't really care. Years 20 to 30, you probably don't have anything significant to lose. 50-75, you're probably more focused on being setup for comfortable retirement. That leaves people in their 30s and 40s, midlife crisis era, you probably have other things on your mind. Kids, hobbies, etc. If life was may two or three times longer, you might care more since the negative consequences of people sucking DNA out of thin air might affect you for a longer duration, but it isn't. You get maybe 75 good years and that's it. Don't worry about it.
deepfriedchokes 1y ago
Flock Safety but for DNA is inevitable.
jl6 1y ago
Health insurance companies could sequence every random bit of DNA in a given area, and then raise premiums in zip codes with higher than average rates of congenital disease. Of course, that would be totally unethical and illegal, so they’d just buy a set of risk data from a reputable company that worked out their risk scores somehow (how? Who knows? Best not to ask).
- robwwilliams 1y ago
  Totally impractical too. The entire point if insurance from the company’s point of view is to fine-tune the policy and pick and choose at the level of individuals. How many cigarettes you smoke and your mean blood glucose level way more actionable.
  - pyuser583 1y ago
    Health insurance almost always deals in group policies. Not much chance to pick and choose individuals. Anyone seeking health insurance is probably a bad risk. Thus the groups.
drdaeman 1y ago
If we're thinking cyberpunk, then the solution should also be in style. Say, if in some hypothetical future it becomes a commonplace way of tracking customers, replacing modern radio beacon tracking tech - how about personal privacy preserving devices that'll constantly spray out tons of random DNA samples (probably crowdsourced), drowning any attempts to analyze anything in the noise?
- pyuser583 1y ago
  When I was a kid …cyberpunk meant gritty, not stylish. Think Blade Runner. It meant a group of streetwise punks who used illegal tech and wore the same clothes for weeks on end. Anyone stylish was a villain, or at least suspect. I wonder why the cyberpunks became well dressed? Was it the Matrix? Or maybe X-Files?
  - Loughla 1y ago
    Cyberpunks became well dressed because manufacturers realized it was a way to sell people things, probably around the time The Matrix came out. If the aesthetic is old, grungy clothes, there isn't much money to be made. But if popular media shows cyberpunk aesthetic as chic and cool, now we can sell shiny pants to 20 year olds. Maybe I'm just extra disillusioned today, but it does seem like mainstream marketing and sales is the death of all things. Now I am become salesman, destroyer of worlds.

blankx32 1y ago

Exactly my thoughts, but once the cat is out of the bag

fecal_henge 1y ago
..then there is cat DNA left inside the bag?

cypherpunks01 1y ago

Surely the police will start mass collection after the technology is commercialized, to solve theoretical crimes. And then claim that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, since you freely decided to leave the house and knowingly start shedding DNA in public.

robwwilliams 1y ago
This is NOT new tech. As old at least as generating sequence from low-copy number and fragment fossil specimens. This “news” is just a tweak and PR piece. Qualeed explains why this is a non-issue for forensics.

arddcootvt178 1y ago

Internet of Smells The world is wired. Is bathed in wi-fi waves. It is also full of smell. Eve and Adam meet at a party. Both are good looking, the kind which is so clean that it looks almost puppet like. When Adam sees Eve and approaches her, Eve is at first welcoming. Her sniffer ring sends her a message. (The sniffer ring is just a ring with a feather moving somehow between a dog tail and a butterfly wing. It is of course connected to the wired/wifi network.) The message reads: "Adam has a very bad form of cancer. Is not good genetic material to mate with". As the polite behaviour rules dictate, Eve forwards the notice to Adam, maybe as a visual message, or as a message which appears on his health wristband, then she moves away, looking for other interesting people. Adam is only mildly concerned. He contacts, privately, his internet+health insurance provider and files a bug request. Then he goes along with the party. The next scene happens somewhere far, visible from the external conditions (like for example it is day there, while at the party place was night) and from the people in this scene (for example while Adam and Eve might be porcelaine figures, maybe blonds, or maybe japonese, the guys in the new scene are more like indians or pakistani.) So these are a bunch of Mechanical Turks in a internet cafe like place in India (for example). They receive Adam's bug ticket. We can see one of them, or several doing various stuff on their not so modern computers, but one of them opens on his screen Adam's request. We can see that the screen has two windows open, one is a REPL Lisp window, the other is a molecular simulation. (This is a hook for a technical audience, important as any hacker movie screenshot.) On the Lisp REPL there is an error message. The Mechanical Turk fixes it, then runs a molecular simulation. It works. He then opens a smell convertor. (Variant, he opens "Nozzle", which is just like Google page visually, he searches for a RNA like word, then he hits enter.) Job done. The third scene is Adam bedroom. He sleeps, not at all concerned, something between a puppet and a child in his bed. Travelling to a detail in his room, which looks alike the sniffer ring, only that it is a wifi router with a feather. Lights flicker and the feather begins to swosh. Travelling to the health bracelet of Adam. Shows: "Bug request solved. Status: healty". The night is quiet and peaceful. The sunrise begins. Adam dreams something nice. End.

Dilettante_ 1y ago
This was a good read.

checker659 1y ago

Surely it should be possible to spoof presence as well. Non-repudiation is not possible with this alone.

polishdude20 1y ago

Yeah at what point do we look back at this type of tech and say "the researchers surely knew this was going to be used in a bad way" and then blame them for it? Like, I get it. The argument that "maybe the tech will be used for good" is an easy one to make. But given how tech is being used more and more for bad these days, surely it's harder to make that moral argument to justify this continued research? Just because you can come up with one or two good reasons for the tech to exist, doesn't mean you get to ignore the overwhelming amount of reasons it shouldn't.

kjkjadksj 1y ago

About the same as being able to sequence dna left on a doorknob

BurningFrog 1y ago

We're already filmed by several cameras any time we're out in public. We're also tracked by our phones, unless we turn them off. Privacy of what places you visit is already pretty much dead. We're the last generation who lived like that. I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that it is, and we have to adapt.

lazide 1y ago
Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even.
- RunningDroid 1y ago
  > Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even. For anyone wondering how this works: the cellular modem is a separate general-purpose computer that runs code from the manufacturer and the service provider, the only thing needed to allow tracking a phone that's off is circuitry to allow the modem to draw power independent of the rest of the phone.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Another good reason to prefer phones with physical switches to cut off the radios. Or removable batteries. Or both. I guess a faraday pouch might be helpful, but I recall reading these aren't really as effective as many people believe.
    - lazide 1y ago
      I’ve had an iPhone receive a call inside a locked steel 50 cal ammo can. No clue how that is possible, but it happened. I guess the gasket let enough EM through? Amusingly, crumpled aluminum foil seems to have a better track record.
      - quesera 1y ago
        Planar surfaces do not attenuate as well as irregular surfaces. Same principle applies in the visual spectrum.

qualeed 1y ago

Even as a big privacy advocate, I don't see much reason to be especially concerned. The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking. Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do. There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could. It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.

rvnx 1y ago
You can clone fingerprint like here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30623611 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30623611 Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real. Same for DNA then.
- qualeed 1y ago
  >Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real. >Same for DNA then. There's a world of difference between cloning a fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like fluids), and this technology. The air might carry the particulates to areas never traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints. Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling to a different city could imply that thousands of people have gone to a city they never went to before. Not happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA. The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless for court, and more easily game-able than any other biometric by a lot. To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
  - 1y ago

currymj 1y ago

everyone already leaves DNA everywhere, so it doesn’t seem like a step change. genetic privacy is a good thing but is utterly artificial, we have to create it if we want it.

deadbabe 1y ago

Life is too short. There is a narrow window in life, if any, when you will probably care about this. As a child, you won't care. As an elderly person on their way out, you also won't really care. Years 20 to 30, you probably don't have anything significant to lose. 50-75, you're probably more focused on being setup for comfortable retirement. That leaves people in their 30s and 40s, midlife crisis era, you probably have other things on your mind. Kids, hobbies, etc. If life was may two or three times longer, you might care more since the negative consequences of people sucking DNA out of thin air might affect you for a longer duration, but it isn't. You get maybe 75 good years and that's it. Don't worry about it.

deepfriedchokes 1y ago

Flock Safety but for DNA is inevitable.

jl6 1y ago

Health insurance companies could sequence every random bit of DNA in a given area, and then raise premiums in zip codes with higher than average rates of congenital disease. Of course, that would be totally unethical and illegal, so they’d just buy a set of risk data from a reputable company that worked out their risk scores somehow (how? Who knows? Best not to ask).

robwwilliams 1y ago
Totally impractical too. The entire point if insurance from the company’s point of view is to fine-tune the policy and pick and choose at the level of individuals. How many cigarettes you smoke and your mean blood glucose level way more actionable.
- pyuser583 1y ago
  Health insurance almost always deals in group policies. Not much chance to pick and choose individuals. Anyone seeking health insurance is probably a bad risk. Thus the groups.

drdaeman 1y ago

If we're thinking cyberpunk, then the solution should also be in style. Say, if in some hypothetical future it becomes a commonplace way of tracking customers, replacing modern radio beacon tracking tech - how about personal privacy preserving devices that'll constantly spray out tons of random DNA samples (probably crowdsourced), drowning any attempts to analyze anything in the noise?

pyuser583 1y ago
When I was a kid …cyberpunk meant gritty, not stylish. Think Blade Runner. It meant a group of streetwise punks who used illegal tech and wore the same clothes for weeks on end. Anyone stylish was a villain, or at least suspect. I wonder why the cyberpunks became well dressed? Was it the Matrix? Or maybe X-Files?
- Loughla 1y ago
  Cyberpunks became well dressed because manufacturers realized it was a way to sell people things, probably around the time The Matrix came out. If the aesthetic is old, grungy clothes, there isn't much money to be made. But if popular media shows cyberpunk aesthetic as chic and cool, now we can sell shiny pants to 20 year olds. Maybe I'm just extra disillusioned today, but it does seem like mainstream marketing and sales is the death of all things. Now I am become salesman, destroyer of worlds.