Comments

• QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s absolutely abusive that in order to get your genetic background you have to be willing for the government to have your DNA.

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  • kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s not even gouvernement, it’s other companies. One day some insurance company will decide to pull out your protections because, turns out, you have X% chances to get a cancer by your 40. Then all other insurance companies do the same. Then, one of them accepts you, but you gotta pay N% more for the same coverage

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    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s the fear. Government was just used as hyperbole to make a point.

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  • sparky678348@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What are the potential downsides of the government having your DNA? I don’t think I can think of any for real

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    • abbadon420@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      What if the government in the nearby future decides it is illegal to watch porn? They trace your ip to your house, come with a search warrant, find you cumsock or vibrator covered in dna and you’re in the system. Boink! Off to horny jail with you!

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    • kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Copy pasting my other comment

      One day some insurance company will decide to pull out your protections because, turns out, you have X% chances to get a cancer by your 40. Then all other insurance companies do the same. Then, one of them accepts you, but you gotta pay N% more for the same coverage

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    • XbSuper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Both of the responses to your comment are batshit lol.

      I don’t like the idea of the government having my dna, but does anyone have a genuine (non irrational) reason it would be bad?

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• MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  No. Every DNA collecting agent in the U.S. easily shares it’s data base.

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• otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ve been wondering this myself. I don’t really agree with the other comments because we do genetic tests on the medical side and that data is kept private. I don’t see why a company couldn’t offer similar stuff, paid privately, for a more comprehensive suite of tests.

  On the ancestry side, it could pick out known biomarkers to trace back from publicly accessible data. The limits would be if you want to track down exact family trees, but I don’t think that was the intent

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  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    For the record, ancestry dna is basically a scam. Especially when they give you a percentage score.

    Ask yourself what is French. Or English. How much interbreeding has happened across the spectrum? It can’t tell you who you are- there is no genetic encoding for culture.

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    • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This makes sense, I don’t really know how they come up with those numbers. I feel like if we DID try to classify it (ex. If you have X gene, you are Y race), it’s much more likely to be used to cause harm. It wouldn’t make any sense to begin with, and it would enable arbitrary persecution

      I’m more familiar with the inverse, where you can provide better care by screening for risks and generic markers that are more common for a particular demographic. That actually helps humanity and is worth studying more

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    • Oaksey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah I’ve always thought when they give those stats “how long ago?”. Where people’s ancestors lived could be quite different during different time periods, that I don’t think can be accurately represented by percentages.

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• Pratai@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Nope. And everyone knew what 23 and Me was doing and did it anyway.

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is there a reason one can’t exist? Like laws that prevent them from doing so?

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• hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not to my knowledge. It’s absolutely pathetic and honestly kinda psychotic that you’re not allowed to understand your own genealogy and medical history without giving up pretty much everything about yourself. Forever.

  Because unlike a compromised password, you can’t just hop on the computer and change your genes (yet??).

  Boils down to a legislative failure.

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  • zewu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Presenting swirlies: a fun fingerprint matching platform. Send in your fingerprints and get to know your fingerprint relatives. Swirls, loops and curves - we got it all! Find new soulmates at swirlies, only 15$ per analysis and 2.99$/year to access the app and keep up to date with your fellow swirlies.

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      When I was in like 5th grade we took a class trip to a police station.

      Once we got there the cops said if we were “good” he’d let us do fingerprints at the end. I was excited till I found out we didn’t get to keep the cards, the cops did and they said it was in case we get kidnapped they can find us… When a minute ago it was just a reward for being good.

      So I said I didn’t want to and the cop and teacher got super pushy and it turned into this whole big thing once parents found out every kid from my school for a couple years got tricked into giving cops their fingerprints.

      I was just mad I didn’t get to keep the card, they should’ve just had me do two and kept one.

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• Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I presume you are doing this for medical information rather than genealogy as they’d need to keep your information for it to be that useful to you.

  If not, check out Family Tree DNA’s privacy policy as they seem pretty good with letting you set the level of sharing that you are comfortable with. They don’t share with third parties and you can adjust your sharing settings so law enforcement can use you for matching.

  I’ve tested myself and a number of family members with them and am happy with the level of control they give but your mileage may differ.

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  • CaptObvious@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Isn’t Family Tree the one that was first exposed for allowing LEOs access without a warrant?

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    • Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’m not sure of the timeline now but I seem to recall that this first came up through GEDmatch (which doesn’t do testing itself but allows people to upload results from different companies to compare them) and law enforcement had been creating data in compatible formats based on samples from cold cases. It hit the news because it helped identify the Golden State Killer. This got users nervous and they switched to you having to opt in allow that kind of matching.

      FTDNA changed it ToS to allow law enforcement to use their database for rather vaguely defined crimes but that collided with laws (especially in the EU) and privacy groups, hence the large range of options available. In the EU you have to specifically opt in to allow those kind of matches,. elsewhere you have to opt out (which seems a bit confusing to me - it should be a blanket opt in).

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• jacktherippah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Recently I listened to a Crime Junkie episode where they recommended you send your DNA in for genetic genealogy so that if a John Doe or Jane Doe turns up they can be identified and I was like lmfao no thanks why would I do that.

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• VulKendov@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Is there any benefit for those kinds of services. Other than just for fun, I don’t see any reason for it.

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  • TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Having access to diseases that run in your family when you are adopted is a great benefit of it, and doing that at a private lab is way more expensive. And the one my sister did connected her with family members who were interested in being contacted. It’s not that there is a lack of benefit to the service, it’s that the services aren’t worth the privacy intrusion.

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• Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The problem is that to be able to tell you anything about relationships or heritage, they need a certain database, and the quality of that depends on the amount of entries to compare.

  Without adding your data set to the collection, they would not gain anything to improve their database, which would de-value it in the long run.

  A service that would analyse but not retain your data would have to pay other companies to provide input, and would therefore much more expensive.

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• raydogg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Seems to me the hard part is getting the customers to pay the “full” price of getting the genetic sequencing done. 23andme’s prices to get tested is rather expensive (> $130 the last time I checked) but they are also getting paid for providing some of that data for various “studies”. So they are getting paid to collect and keep the genetic data, so the consumer price of testing ($130) is subsidized by the other revenue channel (i.e. selling access to the data).

  I don’t know how much it costs to get your genes sequenced, but it’s probably more than $130 per sample.

  I see it like ads… as much as everyone wants to complain about watching ads, the alternative is to pay the full price for the service you are consuming. Most of the services we consume are - after all - profit-making companies, and even the ones that aren’t have bills that need paying.

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  • TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If we could pick and choose what we share then it might not be so bad, but commodification of genetic information is weird.

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