• ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    My first reaction on seeing 23andMe and its workalikes was “why the flying fuck would I want to give my DNA information to a corporate entity in this world of ubiquitous corporate surveillance!?”

    It’s nice to have cynicism vindicated. Again.

    • Purple@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      If someone made a chip that read dna and had an open source program to load on a raspberry pi, with no telemetry or creepy stuff, I would pay a LOT

      • Udonezo@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I feel like we could easily have something similar to a DNA testing kit that goes with access to a software that analyzes it that meets your description within our lifetime. Sending it to a lab shouldn’t be necessary forever

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I’m fine with some company that has a lock-tight privacy policy in place. Even better if they just send me the results and keep no database. But that’s not what they do. They send it all to the government, and then charge you upsell fees in the form of a subscription to see the same information that they shared with the government without your consent. Okay… You probably gave consent in the 5000 page ToS that you didn’t read, but that’s an argument for a different day.

      • ttmrichter@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Has literally decades of corporate interests revealing they don’t know how to secure things not taught you any kind of a lesson?

        I don’t want a corporate entity of any kind to have my DNA info on file. They’re all clowns, or, rather, if they’re not clowns now they will be after a single bad quarter when they decide to cut their security team in half.

    • test113@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I don’t understand the unforeseen ramifications he’s talking about for your entire family. I understand the main fear about uncertainty regarding what happens to the data, which is likely sold to the pharmaceutical sector or Institutions. However, what’s the point? I don’t support such companies, but it seems like there’s a lot of fearmongering without much substance. It’s not that different from an ISP or any company collecting data to sell to other companies or institutions. No one expected anything different, and those who did are likely just consumers who don’t care about these issues at the end of the day.

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        There are examples in there. Police grab data off of a random crime scene, then they generate a pic out of that data. They start looking for a culprit.

        Now imagine “the black sheep” of the family, a crackhead cousin or a criminal, steals something and kills someone. Police get in, get a swab, and create a portrait that looks exactly like you. Or better yet, they find matches of the DNA and trace it back to you - who went for the service. Suddenly you are in deep shit and need to prove your innocence. Also imagine you are a public figure - a local polititian, headmaster of the school, whatever. Suddenly you hit the news, and everyone “judges” you to be guilty. Media spread it around, you lose your job.

        • test113@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Bro, nah, that’s borderline Black Mirror writing. It’s possible something like that might happen, but let’s be real, the chance of it happening to a person is almost zero. Even if you’re a public figure - because if that’s happening, someone wants to sabotage you whether they have some DNA information from you or not. And sloppy police work is sloppy police work, no matter what tools might be used or not. I get the privacy concerns and the not knowing part. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a for-profit data accumulation company, that will sell to anyone with the right money. Sure, some data might be misused to frame someone, or by regimes or institutions and, of course, by other for-profit companies to create products. But that’s neither unexpected nor surprising.

        • test113@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Even with a full DNA sequence, recreating it (how even?) and placing it at a crime scene without police or lab involvement is highly complex and unlikely. Using hairs or other physical evidence is more feasible for framing someone?

      • Doug Holland@lemmy.worldOPM
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        10 months ago

        I don’t understand the unforeseen ramifications he’s talking about

        That’s the way ‘unforeseen’ tends to work.

        • test113@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Oh, okay, thank you. So, that’s it? Just clickbait? - edit: By that, I mean the title could mean something like he found something unexpected or unforeseen and therefore wrote this article with this headline. Or, it could mean nothing if there’s nothing unforeseen or unexpected written about in the article, which I call clickbait here.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        No one expected anything different

        Pretty much everyone, all of society, expected something different. That’s why people were so loose with what they gave away, before it became known how insidious the tracking and violation of implicit trust was. That’s why we’re just now getting legislation into place, 30 years after Google started gobbling up everyone’s data. Nobody expected how pervasive the spying would become.