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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

I was in the military. China stole my freaking DNA profile. I've given up on worrying about this stuff.

Gonna be a very weird day for you when China's clone army invades us.

If nothing else, I guess one should at least be kinda proud that of all stolen DNAs, yours is the one they end up making a clone army out of.

5,000,000 Kulahans invading America would not be very effective thus I have defeated China myself, no thanks are necessary.

Even better "please give us all the things which could be used by a foreign power to blackmail you, or apply pressure to relatives or other close contacts" and then poorly secure that database.

Those are the same guys who told us we must give them backdoor keys to every encryption algorithm, because nothing can go wrong with it and otherwise terrorists win.

DNA, blood type, fingerprints, and anything else on your background checks...

They even got my kids social security numbers.

That is awful, but it doesn't lessen the impact of someone who right now has access to your email and or other accounts. China having your DNA profile is not near as impactful as someone actively stealing your identity and potentially ruining your finances. Use 2fa everywhere, and if your email is in this list, you should change your password.

The number of years I got "free credit monitoring" I can pass it down to my children . . .

I feel like only in the US is credit monitoring something sold as an optional service.

I got a confirmation mail from System76, because apparently they feel the need to validate my credit card can’t be used without my approval, but my back does this by default…

Credit monitoring has nothing to do with Credit Cards.

Most banks in America indeed do offer (for free) the option to be notified for each transactions if you want.

Yes. US residents' ability to obtain credit (cards, cars, houses) is based on three shadowy for-profit organizations who each keep a secret score on each resident.

One's employment history is not a factor in the score at all (contrast this with Europe).

Furthermore, privacy in the USA is so bad, the leaking of one's personal details which criminals can use to fraudulently obtain credit and ruin said score and possibly also one's finances is a major concern. Hence, "credit monitoring" exists in order to catch this kind of criminal activity in the act, and I don't know, become completely exasperated with the amount of ass pain that dealing with this then causes.

DNA is actually almost impossible to keep secret if someone really wants it - you basically shed your entire DNA every time you touch anything

Wow! Didn't hear about this. What test did you get done? I'm hoping it wasn't whole genome or exome?

It wasn't an actual DNA test, but the military takes blood samples of every recruit. I'm referring to this hack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

edit: the relevant text is below

> The data breach compromised highly sensitive 127-page Standard Form 86 (SF 86) (Questionnaire for National Security Positions).[8][18] SF-86 forms contain information about family members, college roommates, foreign contacts, and psychological information. Initially, OPM stated that family members' names were not compromised,[18] but the OPM subsequently confirmed that investigators had "a high degree of confidence that OPM systems containing information related to the background investigations of current, former, and prospective federal government employees, to include U.S. military personnel, and those for whom a federal background investigation was conducted, may have been exfiltrated."

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