Note that you are literally shedding identifiable DNA from your body at all times and a truly motivated adversary would have no problem obtaining enough sample material to do high quality sequencing.
It's not the motivated adversary I am worried about, who actually has to show up where I have physically been. It is the company on the other side of the world in a country with lax legislation, profiling me based on the data I 'shed' online, like a cloud-based DNA sequencing service.
This is my threat model for most things in life. If someone is physically targeting me, I'm fucked. I'm more worried about limiting the casual long-distance attacker since I have more ability to stop them.
If someone steals my DNA I can't stop them. But I can at least avoid being swept up in large scale DNA scanning and tracking efforts.
The data monopolies and abuse originate from people giving these companies data for free. If they had to buy it, or pay goons to collect it, they wouldn't be profitable.
In the near future (or arguably now depending on your purpose) you don't even need that. Assuming enough of your relative's sequences are available, the probability of you having certain genes/mutations can be narrowed down so much that having your individual genome doesn't add much.
On April 24, 2018, authorities charged 72-year-old DeAngelo with eight counts of first-degree murder, based upon DNA evidence; investigators had identified members of DeAngelo's family through forensic genetic genealogy.
Lets say there's some rare genetic disorder, only a few hundreds of a percent of the population has it. If someone knows that your mother or father has it, you now don't have a few hundreds of a percent chance of having it. Depending on the disorder you having it might just be a cointoss.
One of the key differences is that in the case of the DNA sequencing services, you're agreeing to ToS that allow them to abuse your data (and thus indirectly the data of any of your blood-relatives), and you directly tie the data to a name and address.
Sure. I've worked with and know people who could carry this out at scale, although obviously individual sample collection isn't highly scalable.
Edit: I used to help Google fund researchers like Joe Derisi and others who develop technology to do this, and some of the people I worked with in my academic career are quite good at identifying serial killers from 30 year old DNA. If you're downvoting because you think I'm making this up, you're wrong. If you're downvoting because you don't think large-scale individual detection using genetic sampling of the environment is possible, you're wrong. If you're downvoting because you think you couldn't do a whole genome sequence of an individual using a sample collected in the wild, you're wrong. If you're downvoting because you think this is a terrible idea (morally, ethically), that's fine but I didn't say anything about my own moral or ethical beliefs about this.
It's simply factually correct to say that large-scale individual sample collection (at order tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals in a country the size of the US) is possible. All the technology is there to do this.
It seems very unlikely to me that there isnt at least *some* genetic information that would be of direct value in advertising. Like if Google took five years of personalized ad performance info and filtered that through the associated individual’s known DNA to develop a predictive model.
I read a story[1] about a UK-based Covid testing firm who was planning on collecting and selling their customers' DNA samples.
> Its "research programme information sheet", last updated on October 21, says the company retains data including "biological samples" and "the DNA obtained from such samples", as well as "genetic information derived from processing your DNA sample ... using various technologies such as genotyping and whole or partial genome sequencing".
The policy also says Cignpost may share customers’ DNA samples and other personal information with "collaborators" working with them or independently, including universities and private companies, and that it "may receive compensation" in return.
> L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva .. was briefed by the FBI about “the serious risks associated with allowing Fulgent to conduct COVID-19 testing,” ... the FBI advised him that information is likely to be shared with China, and that the FBI told him DNA data obtained is “not guaranteed to be safe and secure from foreign governments.”
Yes, of course there is. Just like any other medical sample you have ever given. Blood, stool, urine, swaps...
But also all the unintentional donations: Every pubic hair you lost on the toilet seat, every tampon you disposed, every bandage you ripped off and threw away, every mattress you slept on, chewing gum you've spit out, every ejaculation, every ... you get the idea.
Well crap, there you go, giving the lunatics reasons not to get tested and make the whole thing worse than it already is...
I'm joking, I don't think you did anything wrong but I'd hate it if a ridiculous argument such as this example gained any traction :
Example : The government / aliens / whoever released the virus so we willingly gave them our DNA to sequence and match with our assigned ID so they can do XYZ in case the implant in the vaccine doesn't work or if we are smart enough not to get vaccinated.
Given the past incidents, it would probably be more in line with a gov. agency getting direct access to everything that goes through a few selected labs for years/decades, so that a significant number of people geting blood/cells sampled for that period would have a high chance of passing their data though these labs at some point.
At the base of it, if the gov. of the country one lives in is the enemy, it can’t be a matter of refusing vaccines here and there, that’s not the scale they should be thinking about.
