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Do you believe it is hard to acquire someones DNA? Mammals shed DNA constantly. If you are interesting enough to people who have enough power to access PRISM yo
by uncoder0 13y ago
Do you believe it is hard to acquire someones DNA? Mammals shed DNA constantly. If you are interesting enough to people who have enough power to access PRISM you've already lost. I'm sure getting some of your DNA would be trivial.
- return0 13y agoThat's not the point. When they have an unknown DNA, the NSA can use 23andme as a giant DNA database to identify you or one of your relatives
- famousactress 13y agoIf you're being individually targeted, sure. I think the argument is mostly about having your genetic information swept up in a dragnet and culled for I dunno, some genetic marker that the US intelligence community decides is an early indicator for jihad.
- bmelton 13y agoI think that the bigger, and more tangible worry, is that there might be something in the result of the DNA analysis that causes his children to become interesting through no fault of their own.
- bencollier49 13y agoHi, OP here. I guess the trick is not submitting DNA in a way which makes collection and sifting scalable. Sending people out to collect DNA would be expensive, so less likely to be used routinely.
- uncoder0 13y agoHey! Still pre-coffee so I'm glad my argument made some sense. Does this mean participating in government run healthcare and blood donation breaks your threat model?
- bencollier49 13y agoInteresting question. Let's say I have a clearly defined threat model. I rate the chances of an existing database being misused as higher than the chances of a screening service which looks for one or two SNPs being secretly misused to collect entire genomes. The number of health workers who'd have to collude to operate the latter would be enormous, and it would leak like a sieve. We're not dealing with the government from "1984" here, it's more like the one from "Brazil" (the film, not the country!).
- jnbiche 13y agoHi, thoughtful post. As you state in your post, the issue is not what's happening now, it's what could happen in N years from now with your genetic information that is being passively collected, stored, and selectively shared by the NSA and (probably) the GHCQ. So while I share your concerns, I don't think going with a UK company is going to afford you much more data protection.
- nullc 13y agoAccess to data isn't the same as having enormous databases of it, there are whole categories of abusive use for which moderately costly individual access is harmless but a big database is terrible.