[anon35]

This 2021 New Yorker article: How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/how-your-famil...) was incredibly illuminating and changed my perspective on our sense of privacy. With a surprisingly small fraction of the world's population sequenced, we can still match a sample to a person whose sequence we don't have. To quote the article: "Genetic genealogy, it turned out, could function as an all-purpose de-anonymizer".

So perhaps be less upset that Mom signed up; our DNA really isn't ours in the same way the documents on our hard drive. You were never going to be able to opt-out.

[jacquesm]

That took them until 2021? I wrote this in 2012:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/your-genetic-information-is-not-...

[consumer451]

> Before you submit your data for genetic testing please realize that you are giving away a portion of the ultimate family heirlooms, the genes that run in your family and that this decision could easily come back to bite others.

I wish my mom had read this. She would have understood the implications, and not done it.

[jacquesm]

I actually wrote it for my mom...

It's very annoying how these companies sucker people in to do things they might come to regret later, there is absolutely zero transparency here. Besides the potential for massive privacy violation there is also always the specter of future uses against your interests.

[drivebyadvice]

>there is also always the specter of future uses against your interests.

This. The danger isn't even necessarily that we gain some crazy ability to predict things about a person from their DNA, but that people believe that it can be done accurately and that police, courts, government, marketers, etc believe it as well.

Police don't need much convincing if it gets them a conviction. Courts will already admit evidence from forensic labs which have been proven to fabricate evidence. Governments will let just about anything fly if someone donates enough, and if marketers are convinced that it might work, there will be no shortage of cash for campaign funds.

Currently, to my knowledge, you can take somebody's DNA and do just about anything with it without their knowledge or consent, and there seem to be a lot of well-monied interests with a stake in keeping things that way.

[Diederich]

Hah, beautiful, well done.

But yours isn't nearly so...catchy looking...as the New Yorker version.

[jacquesm]

Yes, I suck at the eye candy department. Function over form any day for me.

You should see my e-bike, it is quite literally covered in duct tape (it was meant temporary, but we all know how that goes).

Also:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/

Which is probably my best article.

[debok]

You mention in the article:

> Which undoubtedly well meaning civil servant long before World War II came up with the brilliant idea of registering religious affiliation during the census is lost in the mists of time.

I guess this happened because The Netherlands used to be a very religious nation?

I mean, in 1901 they got Abraham Kuyper[0] as a prime minister. Abraham Kuyper was a Christian minister, and is well-known among Reformed Christian circles as a very impactful theologian.

It is very understandable that a nation like that would want to list religion as part of their census data.

0: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Kuyper>

[sofixa]

They used to be so religious that it incited a revolt in the southern parts of the country that were of a different religious branch. That's how Belgium came to be, with the only unifying trait for the new country being their shared religion, Catholics, regardless of the many other differences (French-speaking Walloons with many merchants and tradespeople, and Dutch-speaking Flemish that were mostly farmers, and mostly oppressed by the French-speaking ruling classes).

[jacquesm]

> I guess this happened because The Netherlands used to be a very religious nation?

Yes.

[throwoutway]

And now a nation state hacker can use the same database to identify U.S. citizen descendants (to what generation?). Good luck with "illegals" style espionage

[CuriousCosmic]

Or you know just a normal hacker (see this incident when a DB identifying 1 million people with Ashkenazi jewish ancestry from 23andMe data was leaked: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/genetics-firm...)

[jacquesm]

They just had to have that data eh? Idiots. This is criminally irresponsible.

This makes me so angry it is hard to describe.

[consumer451]

This feels like a "think of the children" type of appeal.

I personally don't have any murderous history to hide. But there are unintended consequences with all of these losses of privacy. As a peer comment has rightly pointed out, nation state adversaries now have these same profiles.

Maybe they can find a common DNA profile for an efficient bio-weapon. Oops.

I escaped an authoritarian regime as a child, thanks to the same mother. I hold no ill will towards her, but I am deeply aware of the issues that bad actors can create with by compiling huge databases of otherwise unnecessary information.

[Rodeoclash]

> I personally don't have any murderous history to hide

I've been meaning to ask, could you please remove the curtains to your bedroom so I can see in? I know you're not doing anything wrong so you've got nothing to hide.

[flir]

Do you want a law that says people can't publish their own DNA SNPs?

Sounds like a free speech issue.

[Filligree]

Sounds like a good idea. Free speech isn’t the highest law.

[flir]

Now there's an opinion I don't often see on HN... hi, fellow European!

(Putting aside my modest proposal, I still want to be able to research my family history.)

[sofixa]

Already exists in some countries, like France. Non-court ordered DNA tests are illegal here, mostly for privacy reasons.

[jacquesm]

I think you missed the general tone of the GP's comment and inferred something they did not intend to say.

[barnabyjones]

I think his point was that using this qualifier gives more credence to the "nothing to hide" folks. The more people get used to saying it in defense, the easier it becomes to use as an attack.

[jimbob45]

Maybe they can find a common DNA profile for an efficient bio-weapon. Oops.

I think we already reached the end of the bioweapon tech tree with Sarin gas.

[jacquesm]

No, you are misreading the GP. What they mean is a bioweapon specifically tailored to match a particular DNA profile. Think Germany, 1939, or South Africa, 1985, but with this capability to see what the possibilities are and how utterly unstoppable that would be. And probably there are contemporary examples as well, but I don't feel like starting a flame-fest.

[jimbob45]

That only seems useful if said bioweapon can’t be determined by anyone else to have been DNA-based. Otherwise, why not just use a conventional bioweapon (lol) and target it more precisely? Using this hypothetical DNA targeting technology doesn’t seem like it’s solving a real problem.

I guess if you could target one person specifically? But then again there are way easier ways to kill people.

[consumer451]

It could be specific to a family, or with this broad a DNA + meta data dataset, it could be enough data to wipe out much of an entire group. Choose the common traits in people who self-identified as a group. English, Jews, Slavs, Native South Americans, non-Han, etc.

The problem with bio-weapons has always been "blow back." Narrowing the scope of the weapon would help a lot with that.

[jacquesm]

Exactly, the better the control the bigger the chance that a weapon like this would be used.

[anonymouskimmer]

Any narrowing of scope would be temporary.

[Libcat99]

I think the important takeaway is such a weapon could potentially target a DNA profile while ignoring others.

[jacquesm]

Yes, exactly. And that DNA profile could be more or less specific as well to the point where you can commit genocide. Think 'final solution', not 'James Bond'.

[eesmith]

There will be several Nobel Prizes in creating the technology to get this bioweapon.

You need something which reproduces itself even in non-targets, which enters the cell's nucleus, which detects the correct DNA - which may be scattered across the genome! -, which has a mechanism that kills the target people, and where none of this will mutate so as to stop effectiveness, change/broaden the target population, etc.

Furthermore, just because people identify as a group does not mean they have a distinct genetic pattern. How would you target "Christians" or "Americans" or "Hispanics"?

This appears to be a harder task than curing cancer, in that many of the same techniques could be used to target cancerous cells but that does not require the ability to spread from person to person.

A bioweapon doesn't appear in a vacuum. The required technological advances will be widely known. In this fantastical cancer-free world, why wouldn't your local health care center have the ability to sequence unexpected genomes and prepare a vaccine or phage in the same day?

[anonymouskimmer]

> nation state adversaries

I think you mean "nation state country polity" :P

> Maybe they can find a common DNA profile for an efficient bio-weapon

For this it doesn't matter whether a "nation state" is making the weapon. An empire state, sub-nation state, or non-state entity would be fine. What matters for a common DNA profile weapon is that said entity targets a mostly ethnic state, or non-state nation such as the Kurds, preferably with an ethnicity genetically distinct enough from one's own people, and that said ethnicity is genetically specific enough, in exactly the right ways, to target. As eesmith writes, good luck with that.

[rvba]

Can you share your bank history?

[Joeri]

Doesn’t that imply that we should object to all dna databases? If a database can be used to identify people not in the database, does the scale of the database matter? The consequence would be that law enforcement can no longer compile databases of dna materials (a curtailment which I wouldn’t mind, but many people see these databases as essential for modern law enforcement).

[throwaway2037]

This is essentially how the Golden State Killer[1] was caught.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo