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>> But, I would never, ever send them my DNA attached to my identity.

> Your DNA IS your identity, and sending it to them is sending them all the information ever needed to identify you.

Not really: in the case the cops already have the DNA but it's useless to them because they don't know how to find the person it belongs to. If the cops found an (erroneous) match to sequence done anonymously, they would learn little to nothing that they could act on.

Now the game might be up if they got a family-member match on a non-anonymous relative, but there's little you can do about that.

Now the game might be up if they got a family-member match on a non-anonymous relative, but there's little you can do about that.

Of course you can. As parent above mentioned - you do not send your DNA. Plain and simple.

I don't think so. Even if you never submit a sample, your bother could, and then they could get a match that tells them the DNA is from a sibling of your brother. It wouldn't finger you, exactly, but it would get them very close.

Oh. I see now. Thank you for the clarification!

For some reason I had impression that it is about checker not having access to some ones DNA sample.

DNA is a subset of your identity. It would be extremely challenging to differentiate two clones who had been raised in similar conditions. This may not be an unrealistic situation in the future.

It's not an unrealistic situation now. 1 in 400 births are clones.

Identical twins?

Identical twins are not clones for a number of reasons.

I agree, but that's the only 1 in 400 number I could come up with.

Wow, the mother has to roll a natural 20 twice in a row! Oh, I guess racial bonuses apply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin#Incidence

> The likelihood of a single fertilization resulting in monozygotic twins is uniformly distributed in all populations around the world.

> Your DNA IS your identity

Identical twins share DNA, but not identity.

For every rule there are exceptions, the number of identical twins is so low that for most practical purposes it does not matter. Unless you're a magician (see 'the prestige').

that doesn't make any sense. DNA is not one's identity as in the metaphysical sense of a whole "self". DNA is just like fingerprint but more complete and more (?) unique. By your argument, your picture + some unique number could be your identity -> your driver's license is not your identity. It's a way to identify your identity.

So is my password my identity? Well, of course not.

But it has great potential to identify a person.

For example when you do not use an unique password (but perhaps falsify other personal information) for two separate user accounts.

Then your password can be used to relate two separate accounts together. This kind of interlinking is common practice in the industry for fraud detection and could be used for more sinister purposes.

But lets assume that you actually share your password with your mother and only flip some number of random bits in it (you can see an analogy with DNA).

Now assuming that your mother identity and password is known and you are only child in the family, your identity is also known given your password because there is fixed change distance between your and your mother password.

So I would say based on this that actually DNA is less unique than a fingerprint (assuming that there is no detectable correlation between parent and child fingerprint).

Ooh, this is such a good point that I hadn't thought about. You would want everyone related to you to do this, too. And of course, no matter how hard you work, you won't be able to catch dad's secret attic family, or your surprise second cousin.

I'd like to impute more health and longevity goals to 23andme than just imagine it's a giant government DNA-gathering corporation. But, I bet you're right -- it's just not tenable to hide enough information about myself AND all my family members that I couldn't be ID'ed by a junior data scientist / low-end neural network.

You got it. That's the whole problem with all these partial DNA databases, it's a matter of time before they get combined and then your future relatives are no longer anonymous either. It's a real hornets nest. That's why I'm against taking DNA from inmates, it not only takes their DNA but their extended family is immediately partially identifiable as well and they get no say in the matter.

In that case you also send over your entire identity any time you touch something, or even when losing some skin or hair.

Let's say you had my DNA sample in your possession right now. You'd still have no idea who I am.

I wouldn't, for sure.

But someone with access to many sequence databases? Maybe they could identify some relatives, at least.