Hacker News Reader

Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this. Google doesn't need access to terabytes of genetic datasets and I'm glad that the NIH asked them to delete what they had.

View on HN

Imagine finding a correlation between specific genes and specific spending habits. Have Alphabet spin up a company that does what 23andMe does, offer a cooler, trendier version of the competition to entice adoption, then in the fine print say they’ll mine the data they find in your genes. Those resulting ads are gonna get ugly, quick.

Edit: Although, in the context of medicine, it would be pretty cool if you can find trends in medicinal health that tend to be common with individuals like yourself, and give you warnings should conditions are more likely to arise. I imagine that would involve adding in a different dataset to compliment understanding characteristics of your DNA

There's a ton of research on consumption patterns of those experiencing symptoms of mental illness, and genes can be good indications of predispositions for those illnesses. There's also research on how social media platforms can induce symptoms of mental illness by tweaking the algorithm that shows content to users.

Not only could platforms use that research to optimize engagement/conversions/etc of those with genetic likelihoods of experiencing such symptoms, but unscrupulous platforms can use those genetic predispositions to algorithmically target and induce symptoms of mental illness in the vulnerable. If a platform knows that a user has a predisposition for overeating or depression, they can then try to lead that user into patterns that will make them sick, with the intention of getting them to engage in the desired behavior of clicking, buying, etc.

But it's available on AWS. Can't google query it there?

Sure, if a Google researcher applies for and gets access to dbGaP through NCBI, they will get a secret key to decrypt the private parts of the data. But that wouldn't make any sense since this is many many terabytes of data and typically you'd want to convert it to a format that is optimized for data processing.

But that wasn't the point. The point was to have copies of the data preloaded into Google Cloud, preformatted for high performance data processing by a wide range of researchers. One of the highlights of my career was working directly with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat on mapreduces that turned FASTQ and BAM files into sstables.

Never mind that governments are the ones who used similar data sets to murder their own citizens by the millions within living memory. The important thing is that we keep it out of Google's hands!

Do I basically have your position right?

I, and everyone else, get a say in what the government does. It's one of the only institutions that I get a say in, and one of the only institutions that people can audit.

I am not a Google board member, I have no say in what they do. The government does, though, in a limited fashion.

Please don't mistake my desire for Google not to have data with the implicit approval of such datasets existing in the first place.

Also, please remember the millions of people that were starved, enslaved and murdered by the East India Company.

I don't think the East India Company was intentionally committing genocide for the sake of racial/genetic purity.

Offhand, I can't think of any corporations who have done that. There's no profit in it... at least, not unless a government is footing the bill.

Unnecessarily hostile and bad-faith interpretation. We can be more respectful towards each other than that.

That goes both ways. "Google must not be allowed to have access to the data that our taxes paid for" isn't unnecessarily hostile?

If you want to conduct expensive research projects for the exclusive benefit of your own politically-correct cabal, don't ask me to pay for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com