I’m more worried about use of criminal databases than commercial ones - a greater concern for those of little-to-no European descent:
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Not my stupid cousins; it was my brother and my mom.
I was like “Gee, thanks geniuses.”
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Know that you are not alone.
Yeah I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s mostly white people using these services. Traditionally oppressed groups saw the writing on the wall a long time ago.
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He’ll blame his stupid cousin for writing that.
You’re not in the actual database. Unless your mom stole your dna and submitted it.
JFC Cory. Your cousins didn’t put you or anyone else in the DB unless they stole some of your saliva or whatever. If they submitted their genetic material and then it gets compared to yours that you left laying around some crime scene or other place? They still didn’t put you in the database.
Your DNA may not be in the database but your family connections likely are. People can infer a lot about you from your relatives’ DNA. That’s how we have forensic proof that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children.
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HIPAA rules would apply to data produced by ‘covered entities’ or their business associates; so a physician-prescribed BRACA test or something would be, despite being genetic.
The genealogy/for-entertainment-purposes-only outfits are not covered entities.
What I don’t know is how much inferential work you can get away with as a covered entity: the rules mostly cover patient records with the assumption that useful data are derived from treatment of the patient they pertain to; I’m not sure if they place as many restrictions on information about people who you don’t have any directly generated HIPAA records on inferred from people you do; which is a pretty common scenario given how neatly a lot of genes tend to be inherited.
A really humorless interpretation might actually provide substantial protection(in that many inferences are bidirectional or can be fairly easily reverse engineered, so making your inferences about relatives public could be seen as substantial disclosure of the records you drew those inferences from); but a reading set on being useless could hew much closer to the “if you didn’t directly provide the record it wasn’t disclosed, no matter how trivially it can be inferred from what you did disclose” theory.
In either case, the sheer volume of data that aren’t even in scope for HIPAA probably makes this moot in a lot of cases.
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Are you wedded to defending a very specific definition of 'put you in the database’s for some reason; or just not considering how readily inferences can be drawn?
Inference isn’t going to nail down any spontaneous mutations that happened go arise with you alone(though, quite likely, neither will a valu-grade sequencing of a subset of your genome, as commonly provided by the low cost commercial outfits); and will only get the probability down to 50/50 for a variety of inherited items of interest; but the difference between the default knowledge state and the inferred state you can assemble from a collection of relatives is vast; and pretending otherwise requires a insistence on standards of proof that you don’t generally find outside syllogisms.
I get that inferences can be drawn. Inferences will always be drawn and when they’re drawn from other people’s decisions or choices about their own lives it’s kind of juvenile to throw a tantrum about it.
It’s exactly like facebook, and many other tech companies, they build a front end to lure in people and then sell the information these people freely give them. A deeply depressing business model, mostly because it works so well.
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the technique could implicate nearly any US-individual of European-descent in the near future.
This seems really shady. What’s with all the hyphens?
One can stay off the internet, never use credit cards or banks, never use credit at all, never use grocery discount cards, never visit a library, and not have info about ones dna. Or one can live a full life, leave digital and genetic fingerprints, and risk identification or misidentification. Mitigating rather than avoiding risks. In this case fighting for HIPAA type laws seems a much better use of energy than living in a cave.
Boycotting technologies hurts the boycotted much more than those who are being boycotted.
Don’t call me stupid for taking calculated risks and deciding not to live off the grid.
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Indeed. It’s like a Facebook which you can’t delete yourself from.
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Kind of like even if you don’t use Gmail, enough of your contacts do that a large chunk of your correspondence is on Google’s servers regardless.
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This article reeks of smug superiority and “rube” shaming. The example cited (a murderer was caught) contradicts the hysterical fearmongering that follows. It speaks to the author’s white privilege that this is the kind of speculative nonsense that they apparently worry about. Are you an unidentified serial killer? Are you currently in your garage burning off your fingerprints with a blowtorch and filing down your teeth to obfuscate your dental records? Get a grip, man.
If we’re going to indulge in paranoid speculation, then let’s be honest; if you’re an “American of European descent” (i.e., white), then this information is most-likely to be used to exclude you from detention and/or extermination in the coming white ethnostate dystopia, obviously. Don’t sweat that dubious indeterminate .01%—you’ll be fine.
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nearly any US individual of European descent will be identifiable from commercial genomic databases.
It ain’t easy being white 
So… Any of you who are operating on the “if you aren’t doing anything wrong” principle:
I really hope that either a) you get a good defense lawyer and a receptive jury or b) DNA amplification stops being a thing and c) the system matches correctly.
https://www.nature.com/news/forensic-dna-evidence-is-not-infallible-1.18654
Because the cops will continue to use these databases, and a lot of them won’t know (or won’t care) about the fallibility of the science. You may not care if a guilty-as-fuck relative gets put away, but how would you feel if you realised you helped get someone falsely convicted? Or if it happened to you?
What happens when the rules about who is an acceptable member of society change, and there’s this treasure-trove of data that leads right to your door?
Frankly, any honest description of Pandora’s Box needs to include the double-helix on the lid.
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I don’t find this kind of slippery slope fallacy scaremongering to be at all compelling. Granted, a double helix would make a fine slippery slope.
Pandora’s box is a trite metaphor, overused by many a tiresome hand-wringing doomsday prognosticator. It’s just a fable, and as such it has little value when evoked in the context of (ostensibly) rational discourse concerning (im)probable future events.
