Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

That’s what happens when bad press about your company comes out, and you’re too clueless to recognize it.

Why do I really care about other people with similar genetics to me?

This seems to be a greater risk for me, if I put myself into that database.

And if someone else has a similar genetic as mine, and they commit a crime, then I’m automatically roped in as well. Do I really want the police knocking down my door, and slamming me to the ground, while they barge into my house with assault rifles and ballistic protection gear, and pointing their guns at every member of my family. This is a case of mistaken identity. But their m.o. is to shoot first, and ask questions later. No thanks!

This is the Law of Unintended Consequences at play here.

And for all the talk about cross linking your genome with others to find markers to get clues on how to cure diseases, well, I never really bought into that.

It may help, but I really don’t care. The disease problem will need to be solved in another way, that doesn’t involve the compromise of my security, however remote it may be.

I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy.

I know at least two DNA companies that send your data to China for processing and yet nobody cares.

So it may not be the reason of 23andme's problems - it might be just that the market is saturated. People who wanted to take the test, like me, already did it.

I disagree. My parents paid to not have their names and phone number listed in the white pages. So they cared about some semblance of privacy, as it existed back then.

This age of Google and search engines, where anything and everything is captured digitally, and will last forever, is creepy as fuck.

It’s no longer even about your social media profile anymore. Or of the curated pictures that you post online to share with your friends. It’s all about your browsing history now. Your clicks, your mouse movements, your GPS location, your iPhone battery meter, your voice as you wake up. Everything, just to build some profile on you, either now, or in the future, because that data is all there, just waiting to be harvested.

This dystopian nightmare that we now live in, is like some prison that we are born into, and which we don’t even know exists. It’s all around us, and monitoring us, and continuously profiling us.

And it has one and only one goal: To turn us into a penny.

Or a coppertop.

>I think most ordinary consumers like your mom and dad don't care about privacy.

I don't care about most privacy. Will I put a bunch of cameras inside my residence, no. Beyond that I don't much care I mean I use RyanMercer everywhere (here, reddit, forums, social media) and even own 3 of the TLDs which all point to my blog that goes back nearly 20 years to high school where I said some crazy stuff that most people would wish scrubbed from record entirely but I leave them there because that's who I was 19 years ago, 18 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, last year.

There are 7.53 billion people, no one's singling me out trying to target me for something I said 20 years ago or for some gene I have that may or may not be expressed or for what YouTube video I liked in 2014.

Employers, and potential employers, know my credit history. I have a public bankruptcy. My address is public record as is the LLC I controlled and ultimately dissolved. If someone wants to know I Googled "has anyone microwaved an elephant" or "how many golf balls will fit in your large intestine" then I simply don't care.

It's public record my father died of cancer, it's public record his mother died of cancer, my mother has publicly shared she had cancer. I don't feel bad publicly talking about my alcoholism because I'm sure some record has been sold that my father was in inpatient treatment for his and his father had a DUI (as do 2 of my uncles I believe).

Don't watch me shower, don't watch me sleep, don't watch me have sex, don't watch me use the toiler and that's about all the privacy I worry about.

If you don't like me because of my bankruptcy, alcoholism, drug use as a teen, religious beliefs, my review of some movie from the mid 90's, then that's your problem not mine and if you want to preclude me from this or that because of it then good I don't want anything to do with you or your company/service/product.

And if someone kills every memeber of your family, and they leave DNA behind, but police are not allowed to use DNA databases which WOULD find the person that commited the crime and they don't have a match otherwise (since we're already making assumptions that something will definitely happen)?

I mean this goes both ways. One thing I don't understand about this whole hate for DNA databases and matching relative's DNA on HN is... why?

Why does something that can help police catch criminals is such a bad thing? Because there are false positives? But those exist in pretty much all other investigation techniques. Cell phone positions, being seen on a surveillance camera few blocks away, having a similar car and being in the area, etc. Why is DNA so much worse?

In fact wouldn't adding more variables, such as DNA, to the existing techniques reduce the number of false positives as in "Oh yeah it's the same car, but there's 0% DNA similarity so no need to investigate further"?

Police "barging into your house with assault rifles and ballistic protection gear, and pointing guns at all members of your family" seems extremely overkill for a, let's say, 10% DNA match. And if they do really do that, then it's a problem with a police that needs to be addressed - not the DNA databases.

> And if they do really do that, then it's a problem with a police that needs to be addressed - not the DNA databases.

I think the reasoning should go the other way: given that we know there are problems with the police that need to be addressed, we shouldn't have DNA databases until they are.

> Why does something that can help police catch criminals is such a bad thing?

Because that's not the only thing a DNA database can be used for, and "criminal" is a word whose meaning changes all the time.

People all over the world are being incarcerated right now for being born in the "wrong" race. DNA databases would make this much worse.

> Because there are false positives?

Yes

> why?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Better to prevent the emergence of corrupt and unjust institutions, than to try to reform or dismantle them after they have been formed. Institutions have inertia - once they reach a certain size and state, any change is difficult.

The problem with DNA is not that there are false positives but the fact that almost everyone thinks that there aren't.

> why?

Because MY DNA is MY DATA. MINE! I own it, so I can do whatever I want with it, including not giving it to some weird company or whoever. Is that so hard to understand?

It's not me who needs a very, very good justification (and no, hypothetical criminal-catching doesn't cut it, because you'd have to prove me being a criminal first) to keep that data to myself, it's anyone else who wants to make use of it who needs a very good justification for that, ideally one that doesn't just depend on brute external force to "convince" me of consenting to someone else utilizing that data.

I want policing via consent. A police force that through diligent investigation comes to suspect someone of a crime and then acts on it. Let scene of crime DNA assist in showing a relation, or that the suspect may be male etc.

Yet a DNA database to trawl is the wrong answer. DNA is not a 100% unique match, it might not even be unique among everyone alive right now. It can degrade, techniques for amplifying very small samples are highly delicate and easily corrupted. DNA evidence at trial achieves that same undeserved halo effect as polygraph as the non-mathematical public and jurors don't understand any percentage confidences. It is far, far more influential than it deserves to be, even though unlike polygraph it has a real factual basis.

It should be one of multiple sources of evidence sought at trial, and should be barred from being sole grounds to convict.

A DNA and fingerprint database of convicted felons, accessible only to police and ports seems a reasonable compromise. A database of the innocent and not yet proven guilty? Fuck right off.

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