Zero chance I ever give my DNA to one of these companies.
I'm not a geneticist so I could be totally off the mark; but, to my understanding, the painful part is that is a big disclosure right there
Now imagine that person is innocent.
IMO the hearsay rule is way too biased in favor of the government.
Worse! Say you know it's police asking you questions, and the questions are all very harmless, so you answer them, but then you start to get an inkling that you are a suspect, that they like you for some crime, so now you shut up and/or lawyer up, but guess what: your disposition's change from cooperative to non-cooperative can and will be used against you in a court of law!! What, you say? Yes, the SCOTUS in the 2010s (see Salinas vs. Texas, from.. 2014 IIRC) greatly reduced the 5th Amendment's protections in this way. If you're talking then clam up, the fact that you clammed up -and at what particular question- can be used against you. And if you never said a word to them, that too can be used against you! The only thing that works is to tell them very early on that you will only talk to them with your lawyer present [and since you don't have a lawyer yet you might never talk to them] then follow through.
If the police are talking to you it's either a) they think your testimony can convict someone else, and/or b) they like you for some crime and want to give you ample opportunity to convict yourself of it even if you didn't commit it (they may not know that, but they may like you so much for it that their bias is too strong to see that you're innocent) and even if you have no idea what the heck they're talking about (because they don't even have to tell you).
See all of professor James Duane's videos on this topic, starting with Don't Talk to Police (this one is pre-Salinas), and then the later post-Salinas reprise(s) of it.
It's bad enough they took my fingerprints when I worked for a school district.
Wouldn't the singular be 'un-alived', these fucking days?
I know we live in an individualist society, but when you are murdered as part of a genocide that has nothing to do with you as an individual, which is a significant part of the horror of the whole thing. You are then murdered because someone thought you belonged to a group that should be wiped of the face of the earth. Whether you really belonged to that group, whether you share the ideology of the group or of those doing the genocide, wheter you are a really nice individual has nothing to do with it.
So I chose that word for a reason..
Sure. I find out my competitor for the top role has a degenerative disease, e.g. Parkinson’s. It’s not relevant for many years. But I use it, subtly, to shape opinion.
More pointedly: we are in an era of mass disinformation. The simple fact that somebody used 23andMe makes any lie about it somewhat credible.
https://www.amazon.com/Change-Agent-Daniel-Suarez/dp/1101984...
23andMe a subsidiary of Pizza Hut... We know exactly what you crave and it ain't anchovies.
Excellent example, but yikes!
There's also things like - the terms of service include the boilerplate "these terms are subject to change at any time", and I don't want those terms to suddenly change to "we will provide your PII to all insurance companies proactively in exchange for a kickback every time they are able to use it to reject a claim".
I already get hassled by the law somewhat frequently because my house used to be the residence of a criminal (2 owners ago it was used as a rental and that owner evicted said criminal). I don't want to add getting hassled by a bunch of people who came in below the max IQ requirements over someone I've never met because they're from "that side" of the family.
When I was sequenced, a bunch of genetic counselors at Illumina analyzed it and said they couldn't find a single gene mutation that was linked to increased risk of disease, which was a surprise to me but is really absence of information rather than information of absence.
With the insurance example I'm not sure I have a problem with that? The whole pre-existing condition conversation around health insurance is totally out-of-whack. Insurance was not designed for things you know have happened. It was invented to reduce the downside of things that could happen, commensurate with the risk of that thing happening. It's risk management. It makes zero sense to apply that model to something like universal health coverage. If someone is 100x more likely to get cancer, their insurance premiums should be higher. Just like if I'm a ship captain sailing into the bermuda triangle my premiums should be higher than sailing around the mediterranean.
If you feel that everyone should have healthcare, utilizing health "insurance" for this is the worst of kludges.
But I totally think this is more an absence of information than anything else. We all have a ton of de novo variation and that stuff is not going to be found in the databases.
1. Am carrying two recessive variants linked to a couple extremely rare developmental disorders (prevalence in live births of less than 1 in 10,000,000)
(no, I did not ask my children or my spouse or my parents or any other relatives for "consent").
But do you think there might be a difference between leaving out a cup of coffee you drank from versus publishing it and advertising it online?
If IBM (then known as Hollerith) could do that much damage with German census data on punchcards…
From IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black.
Imagine the "massively organized information" that will be available to people in power in the future. It doesn't have to be a genocide for it to be useful to them. People in power today are fully on board with "social control" and it's so uncontroversial that they talk about it openly.
DNA is already protected from use by insurance companies so that's a future harm that already got squashed.
And their murderers mostly only had census data and people willing to snitch on their neighbors to go on. A DNA database? Oof.
Considering the second- and third-order effects of one's own decisions is obligatory in civilized society.
Years ago I would have agreed with you but I have my anxiety under control now.
What the Nazis would have done if they had gotten their fingers onto such a ddatabase is anybodies guess.