Originally Posted By: Wolf359
As for the tin foil hats, yeah, a private company has the data. And while it might eventually get out there, what's the point? It's like worrying about pictures that you post on facebook. There's billions of other ones out there too.
Pictures catalogued on social media engines and DNA data in the hands of a for-profit "corporate citizen" are in entirely different realms of consequence.
The only way it's like posting pictures on Facebook (or posting statuses, tweets, granting permissions to apps etc) is your complicity in doing it and the subsequent explotability of having legally handed over personal data. There is a big difference between knowing your drinking habits, food preferences, daily routine, biometric geometry, now we're cataloging coding of the machine itself. The genealogical precision of the methods used is probably of little consequence, whether they're accurate or not. That may be a low priority (ie just enough to give the customer a general outline in "percentages") where other certain sections of the sequence may be what is sought after.
The little example scenario I gave before, the type of stimulus that faithfully triggers the 'tin foil' response, is a perfect example of what for-profit business does.
Believe it or not, but business is not here to serve you or give you cool interactive selfie-filters to play with or enhance the resolution of your front-and-back 6 terapixel cameras so you can take better selfies, or play fun GPS-interactive Pokemon games so you and your friends can have a great time. They're not constantly innovating ways to translate voice-to-text so you can send an SMS hands-free or execute dumb, trivial voice commands "for your convenience". Facial recognition or other biometric research has little to do with your device security or lock screen. They're in it for money and power; money comes by influencing us (to our detriment) to spend and submit profitable personal data, the power comes by us positively-responding to that influence (and almost always insensibly). I guess that's the point.
Quote:
And eventually you're dead too.
Haha gratuitous nihilism. How about this: "What are you gonna do about anything while you're alive?"
Originally Posted By: Al
In either case the Doc. or Ancestry.com breaks the law if they release and so is the party that recieves the information (Insurance co/)
It's only illegal if they get caught
23andme definitely sells your DNA data 'with consent'. It is "illegal" for them to sell it with the intent of targeting a specific individual, but they definitely sell the data wholesale. Like I said, the genealogy bit is the consumer-level facade IMO.