Covid testing firm ‘selling swabs carrying customers’ DNA’ to third parties
thelondoneconomic.com
thelondoneconomic.com
I will be speaking to a barrister today or on Monday to explore what, if any, remedies we can seek over this in court.
Please if anyone could recommend a London-based barrister who specialises in this sort of matter by DM or in reply that would be much appreciated.
Barrister would be the heavy option, but complaints to the ICO and health authorities also an option.
Historically (in the UK) barristers specialised in arguing before a judge, while solicitors did the rest of the job. This division has now been relaxed a bit, but what you are asking about would normally be the solicitors part of the job I think.
Don't have any specific recommendations for lawyers.
[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
https://nypost.com/2022/01/14/facebook-faces-massive-lawsuit...
Britain has populous based representative system so they have representatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_United_Kingd...
Britain does have an elected government so they can contact their government for help.
I don't understand your attack? The meat of my argument is true and you are attacking small details which is a cheap illogical tactic.
Of course, all the testing agencies are collecting DNA. The records will be somewhere.
Do we think that government agencies will be able to access these? Will the NHS? Will government access even be stated in the agreements that they signed to be 'government-approved'? Will the data be available to other companies down the line for research? Or when they are bought up by a big corporation?
The point is that this is another erosion of privacy, another cat is out of the bag. It is all very foreseeable.
Once we sanction the collection of private information, eg DNA for health! to prevent child abuse! to stop terrorism! the over-reach is never withdrawn. Government access to your dna, online record, etc, etc - becomes the new normal. All while the actions of the government are ever more hidden - eg secret courts, collection of data, etc
In every instance of privacy erosion, a plausibly valid excuse is supplied by the government. But it is a one-way street. Why we continuously accept government justifications of excessive over-reach amazes me. But that we do in general (I don't!) destroys privacy for everyone.
Source please!
2) Is it cost effective to collect and store?
If both 1 and 2 are true then why wouldn't they do it? That's of course different from asserting "all testing agencies are collecting data", but are we to assume few are doing this collection?
The news is from the UK. One can order tests by post, do the tests themselves and only report the test results (either the free ones, but there are travel tests available too). The testing firm never gets the physical test sample.
Sorry buddy, you obviously have no idea how expensive it would be either sequence the DNA coming back with millions of covid tests OR store millions of swabs in conditions to preserve said DNA, for future sequencing. There's absolutely no way "all the testing agencies are collecting DNA".
His "informed consent" form does not describe the risks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc&t=1h7m17s
(Where was the IRB during all this? Good question.)
Burying terms of such significance results in unenforceable agreements, so it's naive (but not unexpected) of Cignpost to come out saying they are in full compliance with data protection laws.
I would urge anyone potentially impacted to write to the ICO to register their concerns.
When I give my blood and DNA for MS trials, I get long consent forms and details, which I can alter. (I always cross out the parts that enable my data to be used for profit; if they want to know why I have benign MS, I hope they figure it out, but I want them to use my information to help people, not gouge them.)
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/covid-testing-comp...
Which cabinet member has got a friend on the board.
edit:grammar
This used to not mean anything because no one wanted random blood. But now with dna so cheap, those samples can be sequenced and stored in a bio bank. They are “de-identified” from the lab info, but dna can’t be truly deidentified because it’s dna.
I don’t know how much money it makes for the labs, but it’s scary to me. I’ve never been able to opt out of this process and there’s no privacy policy for LabCorp or Qwest or major labs that includes protections for individuals biomaterial being used beyond the paid for test.
Here’s some more info on human bio banks, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118708/
DNA is not just random numbers. You can reconstruct the whole family tree from just DNA samples. With DNA samples of the whole population we could reconstruct the family tree of the whole nation alive and even some generations back. Add in some DNA samples associated with medical records and you can use this to predict the probability genetic disorders. The more data points you can connect to this structure the less anonymous it becomes.
The key is to get DNA from a majority of the population to close the gaps in your relationship network.
in the bad universe, they give it to an ad agency that then beams ads for the wrong medicine into your retina 24/7
Pandora's box. Just because we can does not mean we should.
"They're using it to track us". Or "Its to make a database to remove our freedoms" claims don't looks crazy at first glance.
At the some time I'm now glad biology had such a reproducibility problem, they probably can't identify a human strand from a rat in most "biotech" start ups I reckon...
What's free-market about being compelled by the state to use these services?
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
Pick any major tech platform and you'll find similar connections. The CCP has their own platforms, just like Russia has their own.
Digital ID, pushed by WEF isn't being promoted by the free-market. It is better described as corporatism. Hopefully this more accurate terminology will help diffuse the more contentious implications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab#:~:text=Schwab%20....
This is an inherent property of the system.
Id we didn't have these sort of issues, Communism is a perfect system, USSR wasnt the real deal!
Maybe someone else here can take up the more contentious elements of your assertion. There's very little I can say here on HN about these points.
Corporatocracy seems like a closer fit to the thrust of your argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy
In their world everything is perfectly rational, there is no such thing as imbalance of power, market leverage, collusion between competitors, etc. In modern concience people clearly understand how an all-powerfull state can turn tyranical, but when an all-powerfull company turns tyranical it's always a surprise!
So you will get "let free market do it's thing without government interference, remove safeguards, guardrails and regulation." Then free market finds that the best way to make money is to form cartels or illegally abuse people who can't afford a layer, or to sell digital eyeballs and organs that require a subscribtion to work and it's a surprised picachu face all over again
For some reason these people are madly in love with a system that is basically just natural selection / evolution. They go around saying how planning is pointless because you can't be wiser than evolution is anyway. They seem to forget that evolution had 6 mass extinctions and that 99.9% of all specieces have gone extinct.
It's free-market that they are allowed to set a EULA like this which permits them to sell-on your DNA. It's notable that this happened with a private service, not one which was contracted by the state to provide tests.
Unelected technocrats are in charge, and it turns out that might not be the best way of running the world.
"With the integration of screenless technology into everyday life, the data ecosystem is growing increasingly complicated. New ambient data collection methods bring many benefits, but they also have the potential to amplify mistrust between people and technology. In this Insight Report, the World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on Data Intermediaries explores the potential to outsource human decision points to an agent acting on an individual’s behalf, in the form of a data intermediary. "
This is talking about have a trusted intermediary between you and your data.
Its plainly a bad joke - morally, its unambigious - you own your data.
But that cannot work with the planned infrastructure, so we have to go through a charade of building trust etc with google, Apple, 3-letter agencies, etc.
Question: who will own/run those purported 'trusted intermediaries'? Government and business will provide leadership here...
That doesn't make me feel all warm and cozy, no.
This seems a bogus assertion to me. I can imagine many diagnostic health test results that would be more sensitive to leak than DNA (e.g., STD and drug tests).
DNA sequencing is eventually going to be so cheap and ubiquitous that it will happen to everyone anyway.
Having published my own results (https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/), I really don’t buy into the idea that DNA is the most personal data that can be leaked.
(Nevertheless, there should be more obvious warnings to customers about how their data will be monetized.)
Edit: I think I failed to make clear that while I agree that DNA is "personal" data, I don't think it is the most "sensitive" personal data. If I had an identical twin and he released his DNA, I would not care. If I had syphilis and my test results were leaked, I would be upset about that.
Photography is so cheap and ubiquitous that it happens to everyone anyway. That still doesn't mean it's OK for you to sell photos of me in a private setting without my permission.
It's nice that you've chosen to publish your own genome but I bet you'd feel a little different if someone else had published it without your consent.
ADDED: For those disagreeing: In general, I'll generally respect your wishes if you don't want your photo taken. But (in the US) if you're in a public place, you have no legal recourse (outside of some specific commercial uses). And that's how things are and will continue to be.
Secondly, there is a lot of hand waving on that page. The bottom line is that if I take a picture of you in a public space like a park and publish it without a misleading caption on my blog, you have no real recourse (although the reality is that if it was just there for no particular purpose and you asked me to take it down after the fact I probably would).
That said, I am not sure how this can be prevented either. We leave traces of our DNA everywhere.
For some people, a tiny amount of peanuts is deadly. The rest of us can gorge on them without any ill effects whatsoever.
Perhaps there many other such substances that cause a runaway reaction in a tiny minority of people. We do not know.
This same argument be made to justify any erosion of personal privacy. With the level of technical sophistication western society has now, just about any invasion of privacy is too cheap to meter. Take IoT for instance. Just because it's possible for large corporations to infringe upon the privacy of individuals for pennies doesn't mean that we should just go ahead and accept it.
Bruning down building is more of a bug than a feature.
Also, if people riot, there is no way to be sure that a positive thing will happen. We can clearly see this from Arab Spring. Many people thought there would be liberation, but what we got in return? Dictators got removed, just to be replaced by another dictator. In fact, it backfired and now autocrats have more power than past. Those days are gone where we ended horrific things like slavery and liberated the world with democracy. We have become too greedy with the capitalist society, as indicated by covid scenario. Sorry, for digressing.
We have certain freedoms (e.g., speech) combined with a (relatively) free market. This opens opportunities for capitalists to monetize data they collect.
Even without monetization, some data is made public that some would prefer to keep private (e.g., a journalist can publish a photo of a politician on a boat with his mistress).
I don't see how we can put the genie back in the bottle so long as we have free speech and free markets. I think the PRC could, for example, restrict distribution of DNA data if it wanted to. I would prefer not to live under such an authoritarian regime.
I am asking if executing people to get more privacy is a desired outcome over adapting to a world where things we formerly thought of as private are just well known.
I hope for their sake that the capitalists realize this before it’s too late for everyone.
Would the owner of a security camera have requirements on how they handle their data?
I am interested in how free speech and free markets enable the interesting effects we are now seeing. Maybe the answer is that there should be stricter controls on everything. That does not seem very likely to me.
That's a grey area. I think it should be illegal if the goal of the photos is to track a person, and legal if the goal is to document a scene. And yes, that's a classification that we can do. We can apply the same rule to the people buying the photos, so it's illegal to go around buying photos about the movement of somebody even if no photographer did anything illegal.
> Would Google Analytics become illegal?
If they sell personal data? Without a doubt. Currently, AFAIK, they don't.
> Would the owner of a security camera have requirements on how they handle their data?
Yes, he can't sell it.
I am trying to imagine the state capable of enforcing such a law. I don’t think that is where anyone wants to live.
> If they sell personal data? Without a doubt. Currently, AFAIK, they don't.
Google can obviously construct a dossier on a person from his analytics cookie. It’s okay for Google to have this data so long as they do not sell it, just sell access to it to advertisers or release it to governments?
That still doesn't imply that DNA will be shared freely. On the contrary, it is important that we ensure that people retain control over their own genetic information.
Filming porn is going to be so cheap it's going to happen to everyone anyway
Now your new employer obviously doesn't have access to your DNA, but he has an active subscription to "NaturalCheck(tm)whatever" which does have access to most people's DNAs.
Sorry, we can't hire you, your NaturalCheck came back as red.
You call NaturalCheck, after getting tossed through 2-3 support staff you finally learn your dna has some markers for some kind of cancer. Welcome to a new world.
P.S. If you think this is unrealistic: Credit check? Credit score? I see people have no problem with this stuff...
Potential employers also have photos of me that indicate my skin color. We have laws against discrimination over some attributes.
Technically illegal and enforcably illegal are not the same. People with pregnancies or disabilities get fired all the time; as long as they're not putting "we're firing you for getting prengant" in writing somewhere, chances are they get away with it.
Same here, they will say they care about equal rights, but in reality they oust pregnant ladies, old peoples etc..
They should be forbidden from doing so. Not forbidden from using it for discrimination; forbidden from obtaining or posessing or sequencing an employee's DNA without their express consent, even via a third party.
> I am arguing that DNA is not the most "sensitive" personal data.
"The most" is debatable, and to some extent a matter of opinion. "One of the most" is hard to argue. It's highly personal information.
>"The most" is debatable, and to some extent a matter of opinion. "One of the most" is hard to argue. It's highly personal information.
Agreed. I am arguing with the statement as written in the article.
>They should be forbidden from doing so. Not forbidden from using it for discrimination; forbidden from obtaining or posessing or sequencing an employee's DNA without their express consent, even via a third party.
I am imagining that sequencing will be so cheap and ubiquitous that it will be like Facebook glasses (or whatever they are called now). Restaurants will sequence food to ensure provenance and quality. Environments will be sampling the air looking for viruses. Toilets will sequence whatever goes into them to find pathogens, both at the service of their owners and their users. I am not saying this is good. I am saying it is inevitable. Not tomorrow, but it's coming. Given that, I consider the personal data I have choice over to be more sensitive.
> This seems a bogus assertion to me. I can imagine many diagnostic health test results that would be more sensitive to leak than DNA (e.g., STD and drug tests).
> DNA sequencing is eventually going to be so cheap and ubiquitous that it will happen to everyone anyway.
> Having published my own results (https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/), I really don’t buy into the idea that DNA is the most personal data that can be leaked.
> (Nevertheless, there should be more obvious warnings to customers about how their data will be monetized.)
> In the article there is a quote, “There is no personal data more sensitive than our DNA.“
> This seems a bogus assertion to me. I can imagine many diagnostic health test results that would be more sensitive to leak than DNA (e.g., STD and drug tests).
It's still PHI, and in this case subject to at least the Data Protection Act. The walk-in centers at Gatwick and Heathrow may have tested non-UK citizens. If so, they may run into compliance issues with GDPR or other privacy regs. Not sure how that plays out.
Guess I'll have to wait for the investigation results....
> Having published my own results (https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/), I really don’t buy into the idea that DNA is the most personal data that can be leaked.
Being as (at least in the US) DNA is used as evidence to conclusively identify (or exclude) those accused of crime (i.e. rape kits, etc) I'd say that a court of law would consider it to be essentially personal info.
Even if that is true, societies should still take extra care to protect the interests of minorities, since they typically suffer disproportionate consequences from human rights abuses.
To give a hypothetical example, if someone had Jewish ancestry and also a diagnosis that they had diabetes, I would guess that they'd want the first piece of information to have more protection than the second.
Of course the situation may be different in different countries and for different people (who I am not qualified to speak on behalf of), but I'm just cautioning against seeing DNA as being somehow "neutral".
I think that's a reasonable framing. Would you perhaps also accept the claim that "DNA is the most personal data that can be known about someone"?
It's true in the reductive sense that a person is made of cells and the information content of those cells is their DNA, but it's also true in the more nuanced sense that millions of people might share the same diagnosis as you (or even the same shameful secret), but no one who has ever lived, or will ever live, shares your DNA (unless you have an identical twin, or get cloned).
I am intrigued that someone might genuinely think otherwise. Would anyone rather have their browser history published over their DNA?
One way to look at it is that someone's choices (and the pages they've visited) are things in their past, and even a medical diagnosis could be old news if they've since been cured. Their unique DNA signature, on the other hand, has been with them since before they were born, and will remain with them, largely unchanged, for the rest of their life, and even some time beyond. (Their DNA may also have a big effect on when they die, and the sort of life they live while they are alive too).
That's why DNA feels to me like it's an intrinsic part of someone's personhood, in a way that "They visited Hacker News yesterday" doesn't.
If not then the crime pays off, irrespective of how stern the watchdog is.
This needs to change.
- 4th paragraph, "4,876 privacy policy" should be "4,876 page privacy policy".
- 6th paragraph, "form of" should be "firm or".
I emailed them so hopefully they fix it. I tend to get hyper-focused on the typos and can't finish the article, strange as it may sound.
It included the "Apache 2.0 License, (Full Text)" over 10 separate times.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/testing-firm-can-profit-f...
>This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Cignpost Diagnostics (November 14, 2021)
Doubtless the infringing company would then commence against the donor for fraudulent misrepresentation (for entering into a contract without authority to do so) but then at least the fight would be had over money, and not over one's literal birthright. Or is the trust idea entirely without merit?
copyright: I doubt DNA counts as a "creative work". Also if it does count as work, the actual owner would be your parents, not you. You didn't create yourself, after all.
trademark: unless you're using your DNA in commerce (ie. using it as part of a brand), no.
Even if you are, you aren't the inventor.
No.
The underlying patterns which precipitated that thread continue.
Imagine messaging everyone. I don't have the time and things would continue as usual regardless.
This report is actually 3 months old, it would be useful to know if there have been updates.
While many are just anti-vaxxers or Covid denialists, you can't argue that the system hadn't done its' best to cultivate these issues.
As for the motivations, the government forced everyone having these tests. In hundreds of different companies. They knew this was bound to happened, and they wanted it, because they don't want China to have genome sequencing research edge as authoritarian countries have less red tape to collect and experiment their people medical data, that would give them scientific and economic advantage
[0] https://www.redcrossblood.org/content/dam/redcrossblood/cont...
Personhood is in the brain, the most personal data is our thoughts. Dna is everywhere, in every tissue, in relatives, in other people, it s hardly the most personal thing
We are all 2.5 DNA degrees of separation from each other in here. Panicking over having some of it sampled doesn't make a lot of sense
I did my DNA test with 23andMe and did not hide my identity as I figured such a fear is not likely to play out in my lifetime. I also have not committed any crimes worthy of forensics (yes, I drive over the speed limit and smoked dope when it wasn't legal but otherwise a good boy).
Gattica was such a good movie...
Then there's always government agencies interested in labeled name-DNA pairs which can be used to find criminals, or for general mass tracking (though that'd be a poor and error-prone way to do so).
Any information can be effortlessly be turned to support or expand the theory. The government could announce we've been in contact with aliens since the 1950s, and conspiracists would go "see! but they're not telling you <new variant on theory>!"
The thing they never would have predicted was that nobody had to round everyone up into camps or abduct them in the night. People would willingly rush to instrument themselves and give away all their privacy for convenience and cute emojis, and when a story like this came out they’d shrug.
A while back a friend and I had just read something about all those nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s. He asked what “the fuck were they thinking?” thing we are doing today. I immediately answered: total surveillance with no regulation or oversight.
As I’ve said before: we just (in my opinion) had an attempted fascist coup. The next one won’t be so incompetent and will have a far smarter and slicker demagogue behind it.
What on earth are you talking about? What relevance does this political commentary have to the topic at hand?
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
"Corporatism became one of the main tenets of fascism in Benito Mussolini's fascist regime"
Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, rallied the extreme left with dog whistles and charged divisive rhetoric, and then had lost to a fairly moderate Republican in 2020.
Before the election can be certified she gives a speech to a mob of angry protestors telling them to march to the capitol. Embedded among them are actual paramilitary and militia groups with strong extreme-left ideologies.
The protestors go full riot, start fights, bludgeon a police officer to death with the American flag, march into the capitol, and start ransacking the place. Many of them are wearing shirts with hammers and sickles on them, "Lenin was right," "Camp gulag," etc. A number of them are dressed in all black and are seen climbing around with zip ties calling the names of various congress members and senators. They erect a gallows out front and are chanting things like "hang Mitch McConnel!"
Clinton is reported by numerous witnesses to be watching the events on TV while she calls and threatens officials in states where her opponent won by a narrow margin, pushing them to overturn the results. She also has a team of attorneys working on tactics to overturn the election. She refuses to give a speech to call off the riot for hours and hours until the national guard shows up to clear the building. Even after that she refuses to concede the election.
I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics.
I brought it up to argue for the risk posed by complete loss of privacy. We are creating a system of total surveillance that will be available to whatever much worse regime might take power in the future. If the thought of right-wing populist authoritarians is fine with you, imagine instead that it's an American Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. That is not out of the question either if the same people backing right wing populism become disillusioned with it and flip to left wing populism instead. Stranger things have happened. For the record that could be every bit as awful as a right wing authoritarian, especially with the kind of surveillance powers they will be able to seize and mobilize.
People who think there's nothing wrong with this panopticon we're building should convert to Islam and move to Xinjiang province.
You might also ask if the figure head president is as half as important as some project meaning onto the office?
There are many hypotheticals you could take. None of it feels relevant to the discussion about compulsory DNA collection.
This seems like a good opportunity: since this scenario/though experiment is a product of your mind, you should have access to knowledge of whether it actually was a coup attempt (the people in question genuinely had the intent to overthrow the government, and a legitimate plan of sorts) - so, did they?
(Credentials: my wife is really into conspiracy theories)
Companies and other large groups have been able to get away effectively illegal activities in the name of covid for over 2 years already... Don't get me wrong I prefer that the righteous cross of public indignation is changing to target the fat cats who exploited this chaos, but frankly this is the same "ban the plastic straw" "use extra face masks in non workable settings" hypocrisy from the last 2 years.
If this company said doing this would improve vaccines 2 years ago there's a certain large group of public opinion that would have given this cart blanche regardless of the damage it could/will do...