Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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> The "worst case scenarios", e.g. getting health insurance denied because you have some gene, still seem implausible to me.

We're halfway there, data mining by insurances already is the norm in car insurance. We should have fought back hard back in the day this was proposed.

> I haven't murdered anyone, so I'm not worried about getting caught up in a DNA dragnet. Sure, there can be false positives, but to get on in life you pretty much have to ignore events with low statistical probability

Even if you haven't murdered anyone or intend to to so - your genetic data is useful in the pig dragnet. Your genetic data may be what provides the pigs with a link to your nephew who moonlights as a graffiti sprayer... and yes, the German pigs are doing DNA checks on graffiti sprayers, they have been doing so for over two decades [1].

[1] https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article398332/Graffiti-Erstma...

Just a suggestion: if your goal is to convince the average Joe why DNA privacy is a concern, and you solely refer to the police multiple times as "pigs", you're not going to persuade many people.

If the pigs don't want to be referred to as pigs any more, they should push their unions to fight for yeeting the bad apples out of the force for good instead of just hiring those who behaved so utterly braindead that IA had no choice but to yeet them in the next town.

At the moment pigs can break the law and abuse their authority any way they please with barely any chance of getting even a slap on the wrist - and even if they kill someone, chances are high they'll either get off entirely on "reasonable fear" or they'll get pardoned.

You're free to call the police whatever you want. But that's not what my comment was about.

Again, if your goal is to convince people (or at least have a constructive dialogue) why they should care about genetic privacy, all you have done for your average person is convince them even more that your opinion should be discounted.

Sure, but the audience for 'being aware of DNA privacy' is not the police, but normal citizens, particularly a good number of people who, despite the abuse, are a general good in society.

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