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by abecedarius 918 days ago
Consider a service which promised to scan your genome, send you the data file, and delete the sample, and their copy of the file on confirmation of your receipt. This is still vulnerable to dishonesty, but only transiently.

There's nothing logically impossible about such a service, and I'd trust it modulo actual red flags. Too bad afaik nobody's offering it. Once they're archiving their copy I just don't see how they can credibly promise privacy in the longer term.

Last I looked it didn't seem really practical to just buy your own sequencer.

1 comments

I thought about offering a product like this but the market seems tough given:

1. Most people don’t care about the privacy aspect

2. People who already got a test from 23andme, Ancestry, etc are unaddressable

People are conditioned not care, but I seriously doubt that is avoid argument for not providing anonymity as a default product considering the risks when genome data is breached.

Surely, it’s not that costly to delete data? The only reason to keep this data is for ulterior motives like monetizing.

I'd pay more for credible privacy. You'd think this could support a small business, even assuming there's no angle for a grand VC-funded startup. (Yes, easy for me to say.)

Nebula actually did use to let you download your data and tell them to delete it. When I was looking last year, though, they'd moved to some new model (which I assume this post was about).