Microbiomes raise privacy concerns

I propose that we collect this data on dogs when people register them, so that when the owners leave shit on the sidewalk they can be identified and burned at the stake.

> “Right now, it’s a little bit of a Wild West as far as microbiome data management goes,” says Curtis Huttenhower, a computational biologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the latest study1. “As the field develops, we need to make sure there’s a realization that our microbiomes are highly unique.”

This is the important part to me. I see a bunch of personal health data experiments and they look really exciting. Then I look at their privacy policies and how they're going to protect my data and it's usually really terrible.

It's really off-putting to see people being so cavalier about health data.

Yes, and in related news dogs sniff poo because it really is the equivalent of a doggy tweet.

As others have pointed out this is probably much more temporal and thus less useful from a privacy invasion standpoint, but eventually if someone tracks this and locks in seasonal variations it might pose a modest "threat". For me, the interesting thing is how much of a person's "scent" is derived from their microbiome? If you can tie those things together then tech that is replacing bloodhounds for identifying scent trails might be able to "home in" on someone if trained on a recent piece of clothing.

Well I certainly won't be going #2 next to my murder victims anymore.

So if you're concerned about your privacy, you'll need to get a stool transplant every few months.

I think this is slightly exaggerated. Microbiomes are very dynamic and can change very often.

Just change your diet, and the microbiome will change.

That's a wolf.