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Comment by cyberpunk | Hacker News Reader

Actually you maybe do. I am extremely privacy conscious; so i’m on your side on this one but health data is a bit different from handing over all your email and purchase information to google — in that scenario the danger is that the political or religious or whatever attributes i may have could be exposed to a future regime who considers what is acceptable today to no longer be so, uses them to profile and … whatever me, right? What actual danger is there from a government or a us tech company having my blood work details when i actually have nothing to hide like drug abuse or alcohol etc? health data seems much less risky than my political views, religion, sexuality, minor crimes committed and so on.

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Something that is not yet known to be an indicator that you’re at risk of a condition.

Perhaps you were given some medication that is later proven harmful. Maybe there’s a sign in your blood test results that in future will strongly correlate with a condition that emerges in your 50s. Maybe a study will show that having no appendix correlates with later issues.

How confident are you that the data will never be used against you by future insurance, work screening, dating apps, immigration processes, etc

Absolutely not confident at all; thanks, i hadn’t considered some of those.

Depends on the data - if you had genetic data they might run PGS and infer that even though you are healthy now, your genes might predispose you to something bad and deny insurance based on that. If you truly do not see dangers of health data access remember that they could genotype you even when you came just for ordinary bloodwork.

Fortunately I live in a country where one cannot be denied insurance, but yeah I didnt think of these really, was a bit of a “typed before i really thought” moment maybe i should put the keyboard down ;).

It seems like an easy fix with legislation, at least outside the US, though. Mandatory insurance for all with reasonable banded rates, and maximum profit margins for insurers?

Isn't it more productive to regulate health insurance and make health a protected attribute of a person like disability etc?

Not danger as in being kidnapped by government agents, danger in terms of being denied a job or insurance or anything else.

Your comment is extraordinarily naive.

I wasn’t saying there is no danger — just that I didn’t really think about it or see the problem, your sibling comments have changed that. Maybe i am naive but i was asking genuinely not stating i think otherwise.. Unfortunately i have family members in the us and pretty much all of them happily sent their dna off to various services so im fucked either way at this point…

Good point, you did ask in good faith for an explanation and just fired off a quick comment that didn’t serve to further the discussion!

When your health data can say you are trans, and the government decides to persecute you, then yes, it important to maintain privacy.

I find it really really really hard to believe that there exists a person in this planet who:

1. Is transexual but does not tell anybody they are and it is also not blatantly obvious

2. Writes down in a health record they are transexual (instead of whatever sex they are now)

3. Someone doxxes they/them medical records

4. Because of 3, and only because of 3, people find out that said person is transexual

5. And then ... the government decides to persecute they/them

Let's be real, you're really stretching it here. You're talking about a 0.1% of a 0.1% of a 0.1% of a 0.1% of a 0.1% situation here.

If they're an athlete this situation could literally be happening right now.

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