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Comment by Bobbcatt | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't consider DNA to be secret information. Given that you leave them every where you go.

There is a world of difference between

1. Having your DNA already in the database

2. Your DNA being out somewhere on the street where it could only be linked to you by name through a targeted reconnaissance effort

By targeted reconnaissance effort do you mean trivial geographic correlation based on your phones location data. So if the Google Street View car had a DNA sequencer on the back and GPS recorded any fragments and location it could trivially reconstruct quite a bit. No one has done this yet, but it's utterly doable. DNA is not private information its the most public information you can imagine is not controllable in any way thats meaningful to traditional thoughts on data privacy.

If an action requires less investment and provides the same value, it will happen more frequently — economics. A database lookup requires less investment than a targeted DNA harvesting, sequencing, and location correlation operation.

So because it is supposed to be trivial to identify people based on GPS, phone and DNA (which I dont believe), it doesn't matter if one gets his data into a DB, which gets leaked to the internet and then can be found/used by anyone? I don't think I follow u our reasoning. I'll also state that DNA is hardly the most public information there is, surely your face/skin color/size/other physical characteristics are more public?

I think this is somewhat analogous to the privacy issues around Google Street View. Almost nobody thought the image of the front of their house was really private, but the idea of it being catalogued and searchable bothered more than a few. Removing the barrier of someone having to physically do the work to get that information at least made them feel more vulnerable.

Has Street View been a problem for the world in that way? I haven't personally experienced that. That's probably why the DNA database idea doesn't scare me. If you want to live in the world it's essentially impossible to keep your DNA a secret. It seems to me that eventually someone will pick it all up and organize it.

Your street view doesn’t contain your entire genetic record (including propensities towards disease, mental and physical, which could very easily be used to discriminate against you). So they’re not really comparable whatsoever.

And what is with this “this terrible thing X will happen eventually, so why not have it happen now?” argument I keep seeing nowadays? Your argument was quite literally: “Eventually someone will collect all your DNA”, so who cares if it’s now or later?

I'm a little confused about what exactly the point of debate is here.

* Is your DNA a secret? I think the fact that you leave it everywhere means no.

* Should people be allowed to aggregate that information? It literally cannot be stopped so I think the point is moot.

I guess what I'm missing is any addressing of the reality of the situation. I'm guessing from the content of your reply that you think that the practice of cataloging DNA should be banned. Great. What happens when they do it anyway?

> Should people be allowed to aggregate that information? It literally cannot be stopped so I think the point is moot.

Just because you can't stop something doesn't mean you shouldn't even try. Otherwise we might skip having laws altogether.

I'm just looking for a helpful, actionable response. All I've seen so far is "X is bad" (not actionable) and "Let's ban X" (not helpful).

What good will it do you that there's an international ban on DNA databases when corporations use the impossible-to-stop one anyway to discriminate against and target you or the police use it anyway to throw you in prison.

The most helpful course of action imo is to learn how best to cope with this new reality. How should we set our expectations when our DNA is public and searchable? Are there behaviors that would once be safe but will not be in the future? I think those are the more relevant questions.

To your first point, you can go out to the street and bring home someone’s random dna, but there is no way you’d ever be able to know who’s dna it was.

... unless you were to look it up maybe, in this leaked dna database.

Dna is not inherently an identifier. It needs the lookup code in order to act as one. A database like this MAKES it no longer a secret.

I'm not talking about taking random samples off a sidewalk. I'm saying if you follow a person you know and collect something they've discarded, now they're in the database. Do that enough times and everyone's in it. That's the exact technique the police use to collect people's DNA without their consent.

Yes your DNA is a secret, just like your fingerprint is a secret.

Companies shouldn't be allowed to aggregate and resell that information. Hope the GDPR will give grounds to close shops doing that.

edit: typo DNS instead of DNA

> Yes your DNS is a secret, just like your fingerprint is a secret.

But is it really? I think the point being made here is that actually it is relatively easy to obtain someone's DNA. Is there a law that prevents someone who knows your name from picking up a discarded coffee cup and extracting your DNA? I think it's an interesting debate. Is your face private? Is the sound of your voice private? Those things are unique to you but anybody that interacts with you will be exposed to those features including possibly your DNA. I guess the concern is how the data is collected, what it is used for and in the case of DNA the impact it has on anybody that has a genetic link to us. I think it's fair to consider DNA in separate category. There's only so much that can be deduced from your face as compared to DNA. It's tricky...

> Is your DNA a secret? I think the fact that you leave it everywhere means no.

There is a complicated procedure to convert this skin scales to data. Not everybody is able to do it, so if is not a secret, neither is exactly open data.

> Your street view doesn’t contain your entire genetic record (including propensities towards disease, mental and physical, which could very easily be used to discriminate against you).

Isn't this a form of victim blaming? How is this different than saying Black people should try to hide their skin color since in many cases they will be discriminated against because of it? We should be working to suppress the discrimination at it's source, not it's target.

You're right, working to reduce discrimination at source is undoubtedly worthwhile. But data does not exist in a vacuum - it is collected on behalf of, and used by, people.

Until we reach zero intolerance nirvana, you can't ignore that personal data collection at scale simplifies discrimination, and also opens up new methods for discriminating. Will there be benefits to society from personal data collection at scale? Of course. But there are also costs. There are plenty of examples of people whose ideas or products became used in unforeseen ways and regretted their actions.

Discrimination should be suppressed at source and systems that simplify its manifestation in the real world should be handled extra carefully.

It's made me run away from at least one business when I saw that their office address was basically an obviously unoccupied 2up 2down hovel.

This is the same gap between being seen face to face in a public square and having a high resolution 3D scan of your body.

We're ok with the former since the dawn of times, we're not happy with the later being digitally shared around the world.

Not secret but I would definitely consider it a PII (personally identifiable information), which makes it subject to regulations such as GDPR.

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