[CharlieDigital]

The problem is you are not a malicious actor so you aren't coming up with good scams or truly malicious ideas.

How about scam emails that open by asking people about their family history of some disease with a genetic marker and promising some miracle treatment?

I can think of even worse outcomes depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts

[SecretDreams]

You've gotta think bigger.

How about generic profiling by a future malicious government that only wants certain types of genomes to proceed to the next generation?

[potato3732842]

Sounds complicated. Why not just figure out which genomes are simply correlated with people who don't support you and then pay off a bunch of scientists to write a bunch of garbage so that the medical industry doesn't care for them properly.

You do that kind of stuff across enough axis and the people who ought to be leaving your supporters dangling from the overpass will be too marginalized and preoccupied to do much of anything.

You don't even need "high tech" to do this sort of stuff. Depostic regimes have been doing it for centuries.

[Symmetry]

The government can just run the tests themselves in that case. I think people will resist coercive sterilization more than coercive genetic testing.

[trollbridge]

Blood is drawn from basically every infant born in the US and then genetically tested for various diseases. And the health departments retain these cards with the blood draws, although I’m not sure how usable they are decades later.

If you have a baby at home with a lay midwife, the health departments retain will hound you endlessly to get this done, although legally you can choose to decline as a parent. Barely anyone does, since most parents want to know if their newborn will have a serious genetic disorder that can be easily avoided by (for example) avoiding artificial sweeteners.

[AlotOfReading]

You'd think so, but the government of California was performing involuntary sterilizations until 2014. An ICE facility in Georgia performed them until at least 2020. It's legal under state law in over half the country.

What's different today that would create a massive outcry that there wasn't 4 years ago?

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

[antegamisou]

It's very amusing that the parent comment, or anyone else for that matter, believes their credentials somehow are enough to quell us about any potential horrific implications.

[CharlieDigital]

Parent comment is coming from an ethical person and ethical people often have a hard time imagining how unethical people operate.

Even I think I'm nowhere near unethical enough to maliciously use this dataset, but who would have thought that a social media platform where you scroll posts from your friends and family could be used as a political tool?

[antegamisou]

> Parent comment is coming from an ethical person and ethical people often have a hard time imagining how unethical people operate.

This is a trait of delusional people as well as those very deep into some "technocratic" ivory tower without any formed code of ethics, too.

[Spacecosmonaut]

I added my credentials to address the "malicious scientist" scenario that some people may associate with leaked genetic information. You dont need an individual's genome to create rather dangerous gentic weaponry.

For example, we now have cell-penetrating prime editor ribonucleoproteins, a derivation of the CRISPR system. These are essentially assembled molecular machines that can be loaded install almost any genetic mutation, such as tumor driver mutations. A picogram of this protein complex is potentially enough to riddle your body with cancer a couple of years after delivery.

[CharlieDigital]

Malicious doesn't just have to be biological in nature just because the data here is biological. That data can be used for a variety of non-biological malicious uses.

[johnnyanmac]

scam emails are pennies on a dollar, though. it's so easy to just go through any email list ever and blast out thousands at once. It's not really a business that cares about targeted approaches.

>depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts

Birthright citizenship invalidates such profling, but even then: I don't think the government needs DNA to figure out identities of people in the database.

[CharlieDigital]

    > It's not really a business that cares about targeted approaches.

It's called open rate and open rates are heavily driven by titles. Spam filters also use reputation to rank senders and open rates are one indicator of sender "quality". They definitely use targeted approaches if they can get their hands on datasets.

    > Birthright citizenship invalidates such profling

Only if you think that matters and the SCOTUS will uphold it. And of course, US isn't the only government; there are lots of other governments around the world.

[johnnyanmac]

>They definitely use targeted approaches if they can get their hands on datasets.

Even on a firesale, I doubt it would be cheap enough for the margins they work on. These aren't exactly large scale, sophsticated operations being worked with here.

>Only if you think that matters and the SCOTUS will uphold it.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think they will. If only because it's an absolute nightmare logistically trying to do it any other way. No country is going to accept a deportation flight of peopel who were not born on their land.

Or perhaps we have an underpopulation crisis decades later which does incentivize that. But that would solve the deportation issue in and of itself, right?