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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny because people are genuinely upset at others who do send their dna around; but assume that their own government might allow such a misuse of personal identifiable information. If your government allows that, the problem is the government, not the people who sent their dna to 23andme.

> Or when the government decides to start rounding people up based on ancestry

And you think that not having sent your dna to 23andme would be a good protection from that? Like, since you are among the smart ones who didn't send the dna, you can keep quietly minding your business while the government "rounds up" people on a racial basis?

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>And you think that not having sent your dna to 23andme would be a good protection from that? Like, since you are among the smart ones who didn't send the dna, you can keep quietly minding your business while the government "rounds up" people on a racial basis?

I'm going to assume that you're debating in good faith and will accept a powerful but unsympathetic example. The Golden State Killer was caught because his family members used commercial genetic tests, allowing investigators to triangulate him through DNA left at the scene, despite him never linking his DNA to his identity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo#Arrest,_...

Obviously this was a terrible man, and I certainly don't regret him being in jail. However, it demonstrates that your relatives can expose you to privacy violations without your knowledge or consent, and likely without their knowledge. It's like when an app asks for the list of your phone contacts, it's not just your privacy you're surrendering.

If we ignore that the man in particular was a horrific serial killer, which I know is hard to do, this shows how people can suffer consequences from other people taking these DNA tests, and surely you can see how that kind of sucks? Like, this shows the technical possibility, which is unaffected by the actual reason for doing so.

No, I understand (they caught a killer in Italy in a similar way, though in that case the dna tests were taken after the fact, in a sort of "gradient ascent" pattern).

But your example is that of a licit, even desirable use of those dna tests. They can be used for bad purposes, but that is what you have a government for: to decide what can be done and what can't. Health insurances obtaining your dna sequence from a third party to change your premium? Abso-fucking-lutely unacceptable. (And besides, at that point, what keeps the insurance company from asking your dna directly, unless you want to pay max price?). If you can't keep the government from allowing such things, you should either campaign to change the government or emigrate. This whole "let's keep a profile as low as possible because the government might go against me someday" is both a bit paranoid and fatalistic. If you distrust the government so much then you should put all your energies in changing it, not in keeping a low profile.

The government in power today is not guaranteed to exist indefinitely. Power structures change, and there is no definitive way to prevent your government changing underneath you as you are a single voter amongst a sea of people with different priorities.

The only power you as an individual truly have is to lower your risk profile if such an adverse event were to happen. History has shown time and time again that governments can change dramatically for the worse in short timespans, and if they have data to use against you then they will definitely use it

Sure, but can you at least concede that this technical possibility eliminates the argument that these services can't affect those that don't opt into them? That's the argument I'm trying to make, not necessarily that a particular serial killer had his privacy violated.

It's much easier to convince a family member not to share DNA with a data broker than it is to stop government corruption. Is it ideal, no, but it's realistic.

>since you are among the smart ones who didn't send the dna, you can keep quietly minding your business while the government "rounds up" people on a racial basis?

Sure it feels better not being a collaborator of your own demise though.

I think that if your government started acting nazi, you should become a collaborator of your own demise by joining an armed resistance. Or emigrate.

Seriously, this attitude sounds like keeping the knives under lock at your home in case your wife decides to murder you. If you think it's a possibility, then I guess this poses harder questions than where to keep the knives.

There's a big gap between "powerless" and "sovereign".

When the literal Nazis took over Belgium and the Netherlands, the actions taken by the resistance in each included attempting to destroy official records of who all the Jewish people were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_resistance_in_German-oc...

Much harder to do that these days, when backups are cheap.

DNA testing is extremely popular with Ashkenazi Jews for some reason. And they're, no surprise, very very endogamous, so that's an ancestral component you can identify fairly reliably, unlike, say, Scottishness.

I think my frustration with the people willing to send their data is that there's the "ideal world" where sequencing your DNA shouldn't lead to things like your government or insurance provider using your genetics against you.

And I'm frustrated because I haven't trusted my government or these companies to be responsible with that data even before it was glaringly obvious they wouldn't. So now here we are in the "I told you so" phase, and it just sucks how much of this data is already out there, ripe for misuse. And now it's just too late.

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