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Comment by throwaway_yy2Di | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway_yy2Di·

Next week:

Show HN: Saliva Road -- genomics as a Tor hidden service. We accept Bitcoins!

-DreadPostdocRoberts

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Somehow I feel safer with a random pirate having my DNA in a database than Google.

It probably is safer in that, you will pretty much assume it will be use for nefarious purposes eventually. So going in you probably have the right mind set to protect yourself.

I'd like to announce here to HN before the rest of the world my new service: the Twitter of personal genomes. It will publish all the data to the web. No expectation of privacy? No problem! I will call it genr.

That's an "interesting" idea: Google Ads targeted for your genome.

A hidden service bitcoin accepting DNA service presumably gives their clients anonymity right? So long as the DNA cannot be readily connected to my 'real' identity, I don't see much problem with anybody having it.

I mean, say they straight up sell it to insurance companies... now insurance companies know that some guy, somewhere, has [pre-existing condition here]. So long as they can't disambiguate "some guy", is there a problem for me? I could see myself opting into that sort of situation.

I wonder if your results are unique enough to be identifying. Also, there are legal protections (in the US) for health insurance, but not for life insurance.

Hmm, could be. If you start playing the 'bits of identifying information' game with DNA, I think it is conceivable that an insurance company (who already knows much about you) could narrow it down. That depends on how much they already know about you I suppose.

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