| Congrats on your navigation of the military DNA collection. I'm more curious what the actual threat might look like. The marginal utility of your particular genome is miniscule. Without deep phenotypic information from biophysical parameters, it is utterly impossible to learn something novel from any single genome. This makes the marginal value of the genome information very low, both to you and any attacker or user. You would not be paid much for your data even if it was sold over and over because the rates are like those for plays on Spotify. There are not fixed differences between human populations, and there are dramatic pressures to balancing selection that keep diversity focused in key genomic regions that are critical for immune response. This is to say that it would be damn hard to target any single group with a bioweapon. And if you wanted to target a single individual with a genomically targeted bioweapon, you also have physical access, making the problem of getting genomic information without consent trivial. People often talk about insurance risk. I suppose that's an attack vector. It's also one that can be regulated with laws and social norms. Fwiw I wonder how often this is primarily an American concern. Imagine a public genome data repository. People donate their genomes to science and post them there for the world to use and learn from. In my opinion, it would be better for an individual to share their data than not. The reasoning is that no matter what is done with the data, the net effect will be that society learns more about the individual's particular genome than those of people who haven't contributed. This will yield better adaptation of the society to the individual. Literally this might mean that a treatment for something affecting the individual is slightly better. In expectation, the worst thing that can happen is that the individual gains more information about themselves. |