Why is that a bad thing? Wouldn't want it popping up while I'm looking for dinner recipes, but it's a hell of a lot more useful than shoe ads. It needs to be deeply regulated -- but most ads indicating health benefits already are.
People bang on about early intervention, and it's useful for some stuff, but for a lot of stuff there's no evidence of a reduction in all cause mortality.
For example, we currently do not have a diagnostic test that can tell the difference between a virus or bacteria so physicians prescribe antibiotics just in case. If we did then we could reduce the use of antibiotics. Genomic sequencing won't help this case specifically, but sequencing at the proteomic or metabolic level may.
1. A lot of people come to a doctor with a specific prescription medication in mind based on ads alone and many doctors happily oblige and possibly even receive kickbacks from pharma.
How often is medication prescribed for a problem that could have been left alone? I suspect A LOT, based on how over-prescribed addictive and dangerous opiate painkillers are in USA.
We'll now be corralling those people not just on conditions they have, but also ones there is some research suggesting they are a higher risk to get. Maybe they'll even start taking something preemptively, because they have a 200% higher than average chance of developing a condition that affects 1 in 1M...
2. Once your genetic traits data gets to the adtech it's a matter of time before you'll see online gambling ads targeted based on research like this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3638385/ and similar things
3. Negative targeting could also become a thing:
- how about you don't show health insurance ads based on genetic markers that can result in high coverage costs? or limiting your recruitment ads to potential employees that aren't likely to have or develop diabetes?
- just checking for lactose tolerance gene would exclude most of worlds non-white population - would that be OK? that same check could be used for medication ad targeting - wouldn't even have to extended dataset
I'm fairly sure I could get you a hundred examples how it could go terribly wrong if I had a couple hours.
The general answer is that medicine is supposed to help you. But advertisers aren't paid to help you. Theyre paid to get you to buy things. And all the trickery and marketing tactics aren't conducive to getting you the correct treatment.