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by shaboinkin 1339 days ago
Imagine finding a correlation between specific genes and specific spending habits. Have Alphabet spin up a company that does what 23andMe does, offer a cooler, trendier version of the competition to entice adoption, then in the fine print say they’ll mine the data they find in your genes. Those resulting ads are gonna get ugly, quick.

Edit: Although, in the context of medicine, it would be pretty cool if you can find trends in medicinal health that tend to be common with individuals like yourself, and give you warnings should conditions are more likely to arise. I imagine that would involve adding in a different dataset to compliment understanding characteristics of your DNA

1 comments

There's a ton of research on consumption patterns of those experiencing symptoms of mental illness, and genes can be good indications of predispositions for those illnesses. There's also research on how social media platforms can induce symptoms of mental illness by tweaking the algorithm that shows content to users.

Not only could platforms use that research to optimize engagement/conversions/etc of those with genetic likelihoods of experiencing such symptoms, but unscrupulous platforms can use those genetic predispositions to algorithmically target and induce symptoms of mental illness in the vulnerable. If a platform knows that a user has a predisposition for overeating or depression, they can then try to lead that user into patterns that will make them sick, with the intention of getting them to engage in the desired behavior of clicking, buying, etc.