> If, for whatever reason, you'd like to maintain your privacy, the researchers have a couple of suggestions you could support. One is simply to have the government redefine private information to reflect this new reality, so that the studies it funds no longer link any personal information with DNA sequences.
Improving government research anonymization standards is a good thing. But it will not go nearly far enough to solve privacy complaints from relatives of people who've had their DNA commercially tested for genealogy.
> They also suggest that companies that offer direct-to-consumer genetics standardize on a signed, encrypted file format for information on variations. That would prevent people from taking DNA information from other sources, like DNA sequence repositories, and using it to track down your family members.
I strongly believe more and better privacy regulation is necessary. I'm really curious to learn more about what sort of encrypted file format this person wants to standardize on and exactly how it's supposed to prevent people from taking DNA information from other sources.