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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

It’s not especially valuable or private anyway. If you leave something everywhere you go (ie you can’t protect it without a spacesuit), and there’s nothing special about it compared to anyone else’s (in terms of economic value), it can’t be either of those things.

People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it. (There’s actual discrimination issues on this one of course, not to mention family drama…)

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This is not thoughtful. Everything is somewhere, so therefore nothing is special as compared to anything? Nevertheless, businesses and dictatorships somehow find value in the information collected and organized in files and databases.

I didn't say anything about "the information collected and organized in files and databases". And I don't think businesses find your fingerprints very helpful in selling you things.

Mostly the value in tracking you comes from profiling you, i.e. building relationships between facts, mostly metadata about what you do over time. But biometrics aren't metadata and aren't what you do.

I did mention "discrimination" but redacting data in case future governments are racist isn't all that useful; they're the government, you can't hide from them, and since discrimination isn't based on real objective categories then you can't predict what it will be based on. There's no biometric for being a Cagot.

Fingerprints and DNA are valuable with regard to identifying a particular person (or to place them at a certain location, like the scene of a crime). It's easy to enter a country with someone else's cell phone. It's much harder to enter a country with someone else's fingerprints or DNA. Isn't that the goal here? To have a more reliable method identify who has entered a country?

> People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it.

That's not why people are sensitive about their DNA. It's more to do with the fact that health insurance companies could know if they are particularly susceptible to a myriad of mendelian (gene-linked) diseases and disorders "just by looking at it". Another reason to be sensitive about DNA- if my brother's DNA was found at a crime scene and my DNA was in a database like 23andMe, police could start going after my family members as suspects. This has happened.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/a-father-took-an-at-ho...

> To have a more reliable method identify who has entered a country?

On the US’ side yes, but it’s not more reliable tracking because the US doesn’t have exit customs and so doesn’t actually verify if people have left the country again.

Though nobody’s against biometrics because of this surely? I don’t think anyone campaigns for the right to enter on fake passports. Spies maybe.

As for health insurance, there’s no country where they’re allowed to act on opinions like that, aside for asking if you’re a smoker. They’re specifically banned from genetic testing on top of that, but they wouldn’t be secretly collecting that info anyway.

…Not that they even exist in most countries.

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