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I do trust the profit motive of a small company, bound by various contracts and laws, public perception, and their own need for future customers to voluntarily opt-in, moreso than the state's shifting policies, pandering to the different fears of various eras. Even where the profit motive can lead to abuses, those abuses pale in comparison to the history of even very good governments. California is one of the most accountable governments in the world, but in the memory of its living residents has imposed both forced internment of its citizens by their ethnicity (WW2) and forced sterilization (until 1963). What future crime or health scares could lead to the repurposing of this broadly-collected state data? (It's quite hard to opt-out of this collection, whereas it's costly to opt-in to 23andMe's program.) And if state-repurposing happens, those who implement the change, perhaps including for-profit companies in partnership with the state, can be insulated from accountability, because when the state decides to do it, it is 'legal'. Perhaps you assign those scenarios much lower probability than the more common and mundane privacy abuses of profit-seeking sleazeballs. OK, fine. Still, the magnitude of damage the state can do, with its powers of compulsion and confiscation, is much larger. Fewer events, yes, but much worse when they happen. So if you're 'terrified' by the chance 23andMe might misuse voluntarily-offered genetic materials, against their own policies, state law, and customer preferences, you ought to reserve at least some fear as well for the danger from the much larger cache of genetic data, collected without explicit consent, already in the hands of an institution that – when it occasionally misfires – does more damage than any single company can. |
"bound by laws" - like the laws and regulations enforced by the FDA?