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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of their policies, they still want to store it themselves and put it on the Internet.

I am hoping that someday there will be a sequencing company that will mail me a drive containing the only copy and destroy the sample.

I'm not worried about a sophisticated attack on my individual sequence but I suspect most of these services are or will be targeted by advanced and persistent attackers.

Call me paranoid but I don't want my genome in an internet connected database (though I am very curious to see it).

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I wonder if there's some way to do testing on a walk-in basis, in a way that would allow transparency re the lack of sample and data retention.

So a customer walks in, provides a sample, and walks out with data on a thumb drive. And perhaps also with the module that was used for the analysis.

That would obviously more expensive than the $100 sequencing a lot of people are looking for, but for very privacy conscious people this could be available right now with a MinION[0] that's already in the $1000-2000 range, if you really want to take the whole device with you.

[0]: https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion

Wow, that's better than I expected! So maybe a resale market could develop on Craigslist or whatever. Buy one, get your data, clean and wipe it thoroughly, and then resell it. Maybe the refurbished price would stabilize at $500 or whatever.

There are some caveats with that though (some of which I just found out after some digging):

- You'll probably need more than one flow cell (which is used up during sequencing) for a human genome

- The flow cells make up the bulk of the price, costing ~$800 in single unit quantities

- You have to send in used flow cells for refurbishing (which is how they can make them as cheap)

So the $1000 is more or less already the refurbished price.

I wonder how fast the flow cell price will drop. But even at $1000 I might be tempted, except that I'm so damn old, and never (as far as I know) had any kids.

While it mostly comes out to the same, I doubt the price will drop much, but rather they will release a newer iteration of flow cells with slower degradation or more redundancy.

There also doesn't seem to be any significant competition, as Oxford Nanopore has a very broad patent portfolio surrounding their tech.

This is not meant to be confrontational in any way: what are the risks of having your genome exposed?

Primarily my concern is what it will be possible to infer about a person (or what some people think they can infer) from the genome not just now but in 40 years.

The history of science and politics are filled with ugly chapters of people committing bad acts based on the ancestry of other people.

And you should trust that company or government based on what?

I have no argument against more paranoia, but my curiosity is such that I'm willing to take some risk.

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