Comment by johnnycab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnycab | Hacker News Reader

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>Sounds like a good thing to me

Which part sounds good? At it's most simplest, the part where you are not just frittering away your own privacy, but also of those related to you ─ in order to help a Google spin-off based on nepotism, should be reason enough to remain wary ─ until at least some semblance of how to deal with bad practices or egregious cases, is offered by lawmakers on this subject.

Tiffany C. Li, a privacy expert and resident fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, told Tom's Guide. "You are paying to help the company make money with your data"

When you give your DNA data to companies like Ancestry.com or 23andMe, you give up not only your own genetic privacy, but that of your entire family

"You are paying to help the company make money with your data" also describes Amazon, Target, and my local gas station. In this day and age, it's hardly an indictment.

I'm legally allowed to follow you in public and pick up hair or skin particles that fall off of you.

NAL. The act of following someone with the express intent of collecting genetic material and then covertly sending it off to be processed, without any overall consent, might be considered legal in your jurisdiction. However, you will require a rigorously disciplined approach, in order to acquire a non-contaminated sample, not to mention the costs associated with this exercise ─ just in case, you had any designs of putting this idea on a pitch deck.

Nevertheless, the above-mentioned debate is moot, especially when you consider the original point(s) made in the article, with regards to the vagaries of explicitly sharing your genetic data without first analysing the implications.

it really wouldn't be hard. person goes to a cafe, train station, and a store. grab probable hair sample from cafe, train station, and store. run pcr on 5 fingerprinting markers (kids do this in ap bio, not hard). if all three samplings match, that's probably your guy.

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