Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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