[JunkDNA]

The content of the data is not the issue. The point is that society has decided to pass a law stating that certain data needs to be treated a certain way or there are serious penalties because of past abuses. We in the US take for granted that this law exists, but there was much complaining in the medical establishment about how burdensome it is to them conducting their work because of all the extra protections it required. This was especially true in biomedical research where patient data was pretty carelessly treated in many cases. Not because the people involved were bad people, but because society as a whole had not thought through the consequences of walking around with an unencrypted list of cancer patients on a floppy disk.