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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

This is why I want a genetic sequencing lab that will sequence your genome, send it to you encrypted by your own public key and once you confirm receipt and verify it is valid, DELETE IT COMPLETELY. Along with the record you were their customer after the 6 months or whatever required for waiting out chargebacks.

Then you can analyze your DNA with a desktop app that doesn't send out any data.

The deleting part is hard to find.

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There's a massive tension between privacy and utility. Most of the value of having the data is in publishing it so you can match with relations.

Seems unlikely to be a sustainable business.

For GEDMatch, Ancestry.com, 23andMe, etc, most of the value comes from being able to aggregate many people's data. If they had to delete it after collecting, they'd have to charge a lot more, and there's just no market for that.

Perhaps they could anonymize the data (at least, purge foreign key references to account/billing info) after 6 months, but not delete it.

Much like you can't anonymize browsing history data, email metadata or financial transactions -- I suspect DNA information also cannot be satisfactorily anonymized.

"Anonymized data" is a marketing term.

Was going to say this as well- I highly doubt it's possible to anonymize DNA and still have useful data.

'Anonymized Data' is a misnomer.

This makes me wonder if there would be some use in zero knowledge protocols that use a person's DNA information for the secret.

It’s not unstable in anyway. What he’s describing is a lab. Lots of labs will do exactly what he wants.

You can do pretty much that by getting your DNA sequenced by Dante labs and then using Promethease on it.

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