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Discussion (76 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
NJ is just ahead of giving law enforcement access whenever it wants for searches, and renting the data to whoever pays.
Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point:
both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia")
You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'.
A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information.
Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.
The law however is only as good as it is being enforced. And if recent events is anything to go by, not having this data is generally the strongest protection.
How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?
"We're sorry your job application was rejected because we found you were 4% less maximally conscientious than the median applicant"
I've had job applications (albeit in secured projects) rejected for similarly vague bullshit ("Insufficiently candid")
Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.
There are some sorts of protocols and conventions that might help with this.
For example, not-for profit medical systems can hold certain records , then problems are regionally isolated and have extra layers of protection.
Biosignatures, similarly, we may want to only enabling 'matching, and with a warrant' - so that gov may not procure individuals biometrics, but only require a 3rd party lab to do matching, with oversight, process etc.
That would radically limit concentration of of actual power, likelhihood of problems.
If biometric matching companies were liable for failure to implement protocol (aka delete after test) etc - then that's powerful.
Regulations are never perfect, but they work.
Companies can skirt the law - but 99% of the time it's just normal compliance.
The trick is to make regs that don't encourage breaking compliance, and when it happens, the blast radius is limited.
Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.
I don’t remember the exact details, because I have watched it long time ago, but they don’t need an exact match. Actually it’s more scary - if your distant cousin has DNA “in the system” - you are in it too.
This 1M DNAs may “help” match an order of magnitude more people.
I'd argue that while a DNA match could be a very good starting point for a conviction, other evidence should also be presented, for the reasons you suggest. For example, there is the case of the Phantom of Heillbron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn), where European police found DNA evidence of a woman being at many diverse crime scenes, but it turned out the cotton swabs used for testing were contaminated by at worker at the factory (The swabs weren't certified for police work)
The problem is that we're proposing a DNA database, so you're now comparing 1 sample found at a crime scene with 300ish million people. That's a 300M in 100B chance, or 1 in 333, of some person having a false positive match.
Now combine that with thousands of samples being tested every day (because let's be honest, why wouldn't you use such a database for literally every single crime?) and you're looking at dozens of false-positives per day. It is only a matter of time before it isn't someone with an airtight alibi at the other side of the country, but someone reasonably-close who was just sitting alone on their couch at home all weekend. How are they going to prove they weren't involved in the crime?
This is why large-scale DNA matching is a horrible starting point for a conviction. It gives you a false sense of security, and it makes the investigators lazy. In most cases it is far better if DNA is used as the final nail in the coffin when you've already got a solid case against a suspect.
https://womenherald.com/health/the-chimerism-case-how-lydia-...
In reality, juries often hold evidence like this (and also-very-unreliable eye witness testimony) in high regard, based on how it's positioned into the narrative.
Remaining is to upgrade old phones of every body.
On the upside, think how good that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA article will be.
(Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.)
At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.
You never know who will be in power tomorrow. The convenience of a centralized system today does not outweigh the catastrophic danger of that system in the wrong hands in the future. Specially nowadays.
The gist is that this was always done when people were arrested for criminal offences. They're now doing it for civil offences and, like with all the ICE stuff, it seems to be do first, ask questions later. So you can be a citizen but your data might end up in their systems anyway as it's submitted before they find out you are a citizen...
10 years ago we found out, from a budget proposal that was in dispute, that the police had sent every mental health database in the Netherlands to Palantir. Regular health databases too, but if you're Dutch, Peter Thiel knows exactly what you told the "the law guarantees you can trust me" social worker 20 years ago. Or what you told any Dutch police officer at the border, on the street, ... Everything. That's what the Dutch state used their authority for.
There were multiple governments operating pervasive surveillance states and using them to punish dissidents on the western part of European continent well within a human lifetime from today. What makes you think that won't happen again, this time in a completely iron-clad way?
(France actually ban paternity testing without a court order!)
Because the GDPR is only concerned with data collection not explicitly required by law. If a government passes a law to set up a genetic database, then that it totally fine with the GDPR.
America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.
This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other then nebulous claims. Yes, DNA is like finger printing someone, which is routinely done for arrests, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of family relations, which is at the heart of many ICE concerns.
The same way, I might add, that you or I want to exclude squatters from our homes, and the same way (I assume) most of us don't invite hobos in to sleep in our beds.
If you say that's bad too and that it's much like Apartheid, then all I can conclude is that maybe I need to learn more about Apartheid. Maybe it's not so bad as I have been told.
But they don't in absolutely any sense (legal, moral, philosophical) own the country. And especially they do not "own" the culture (because that's actually impossible). So all you have is jingoism propping up this entire notion.