Is a UK company less likely to give your data away? I thought the UK government was also in on the spying. Really, is there any company or government that you can genuinely trust not to spy on you, or to hand over your data?
I don't even know why the state would need to go through 23andme. You're shedding your DNA everywhere you go. It's not hard to collect a sample.
Interestingly, 23andme addresses this by requiring a quite large saliva sample. The theory being that with such a large sample required you will not be able to gather enough spit from someone surreptitiously to get their genetic profile.
It took me about 10 minutes to generate enough spit to put into the test tube to reach it to the marked fill level. It took longer because you're not allowed to drink anything for a period of time before you collect the sample.
Of course not - that's silly. But I'm happy that 23andme has safeguards in place to stop regular people from surreptitiously collecting DNA from someone and using it to check their DNA.
Need, maybe not - but it's infinitely easier to send a single letter to a single company than to follow 100,000 individuals around, establish their identity and then pick up their cigarette butts.
Same deal with the phone metadata collection. You want to know if Joe Badguy is up to something, keeping poor company or hanging around the bad part of town? Much easier to pull up his cell phone and credit card data than to put a watch on him.
Monitoring the pipes is also pretty greasy, but people consider those 'public' anyway and encrypt if necessary.
Also, the UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which is the main law governing spies doing mass collection of content and meta-data has many more abuses - (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2696031/Anti-terroris...)
> An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year. The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.
These are all active, ongoing, abuses against real people using real data. It is a problem that GCHQ collects data, and it's a problem even if they don't grep it because eg McCarthyism could happen.
The UKCrypto mailling list possibly has some discussion about the UK laws and the requirement to not let anyone know if you're being investigated. But I have no idea what to search for. (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcrypto/)
This is also the country that has the MI5 which is a stated domestic spy agency. I am completely against the NSA spying but if you are living in the UK you have less privacy and less rights in regards to search and seizure. The police can also stop you at any time and question you.