Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

oxomoxo ,

It doesn’t matter if you use a service or not. Someone in your family most likely has DNA on file, either through voluntary submission, like 23andme, or through law enforcement, military government interactions that require submission. Once a family member is on file, it’s easy to ID you. Many crimes have been solved this way.
Point being, doesn’t even matter if you try to keep private, if a nation state or three letter agency wants you, you done. If you’re worried about some company having your data just don’t participate in any of them… pretty much all you can do currently.

Nefara ,

You can call me paranoid, but the first thing I thought of when I heard about it was how excited the Nazis would have been to access a database like that when they came into power. Imagine knowing the names and addresses of whatever Undesirables you wanted to single out, and exactly what percentage of "impure" they were. Ethnic makeup information can also be used against you in things like gerrymandering congressional districts to hand select voters and disenfranchise minorities. It's pretty safe to assume that once your genetic profile has been gathered by a private company, it's vulnerable to all sorts of bad actors gaining access and using that information. Would you want the KKK or the Proud Boys knowing just what percentage black you are? No thanks.

mozz , (edited )
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

The big real-world implication I'm aware of is that law enforcement can match DNA they found somewhere against 23andme's database. Then if you (or any of your relatives!) are in the database because they've ever used 23andme, they'll find that out, and they can use it to investigate or prosecute you.

Whether you think that's a good or a bad thing depends a lot on whether you think the cops should be able to succeed if they get a hold of someone's DNA and are looking for the person to match their sample against... that success is, to me, much more likely to be a good thing than a problem, but that may not be the consensus view here and it's certainly a massive, massive privacy implication.

Euphorazine ,

Well prosecutors and cops are incentivized to get arrests. Whether to pump numbers up for promotions or to use in campaigning. So it wouldn't surprise me if cops turn a cold case into a witch hunt because some partial DNA match in a "private" database gave them a few suspects and then they start to build some case to fit the suspects.

mozz ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Well prosecutors and cops are incentivized to get arrests. Whether to pump numbers up for promotions or to use in campaigning.

Accurate, and it does impact their decisions in ways that are sometimes pretty bad

So it wouldn't surprise me if cops turn a cold case into a witch hunt because some partial DNA match in a "private" database gave them a few suspects and then they start to build some case to fit the suspects.

What do you think the ratio is of unsolved rapes, to felony cases that were falsified by cops and prosecutors that led to a conviction? I know the second one happened one time in the recent past, and it was a big enough deal that they made a Netflix special about it. I don't know of it happening a second time besides that.

Euphorazine ,

Well overall, using these techniques has probably resolved a ton of investigations where the leads ran out and it being an overall positive. I think it would still be better that DNA from these sources cannot be used in trial. So a DNA match can give you a new angle to find other elements, but the fact DNA was used to find a trail shouldn't be admissable.

I guess the saying "better 100 guilty people go free rather than an innocent man should suffer" applies though.

My bias though is probably skewed through the media I consume. I do watch a lot of channels like Lackluster YouTube videos (shows corruption and double standards in policing). I do try to balance it out with channels like Code Blue Cam which does highlight good policing too, but I would say I have an inherent distrust with policing nowadays.

mozz ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

My bias though is probably skewed through the media I consume. I do watch a lot of channels like Lackluster YouTube videos (shows corruption and double standards in policing)

Yeah. I don't want to get into my whole take on ACAB or anything, but what I'll say quick about it is that when the court system is involved, the opportunity for abuse is way less. Police on their own with no oversight and everyone believes what they say always like back in the day, is way different from police with bodycams and modern hypervigilant cell-phone/news-media oversight like the modern day, is way different from police having to show up in court and the defense lawyer gets to mount a vigorous at-length factual challenge to whatever they're saying happened. It's still far far from a perfect system (public defender / plea agreement / wtf) but it's also not equal to the stereotype where all the cops are just trying to get out and do as much harm to society as they can possibly manage every single day and nothing like working to catch rapists ever happens in real life.

Plus, if the cops wanted to falsify the DNA and put someone away, they can do that without 23andme being involved. If they're trying to run a match against the DNA they found to look for people to interview / cross match with whatever sample they have, then that's already a moderate indication that they're trying to find the actually guilty person.

BearOfaTime ,

You should go sit in on court cases before making such claims.

The "experts" often used in court cases are frequently not so expert as the seem. It's staggering some of the stuff that gets passed off as "evidence". Like "gun fingerprinting" - "experts", in court, will claim they can positively connect a case to a gun with extremely high accuracy - if you look into the research, it's practically useless.

mozz ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

When did you sit in on court cases? What did you observe in terms of the experts and their testimony when you did? Or maybe a better way to ask it is, how many times have you been in court and observed the proceedings?

I have family who are lawyers, I've been to court a few times, and I've had friends on both sides of the justice system. Not sure why you assume I'm just totally unfamiliar with these things.

jlow ,
@jlow@beehaw.org avatar

Those two apparently don't allow law enforcement access to their databses (yet?) even though I seem to remember they do. But others do:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/science/dna-police-laws.html

floofloof ,

23andme already got hacked and 7 million people's private data was compromised:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/05/23andme-hack-data-breach

BearOfaTime ,

I have some family who used them (against my advice), so now that's partly my DNA out there.

shortwavesurfer ,

Just from the title before I read the actual post, my first answer was going to be 18 years.

nothacking ,

These services, like most companies will store your data indefinitly, and can be hacked. You cound end up with your name, what ever infromation the service gave you, and contact info on the internet. This is not the end of the world, but something to be aware of.

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

Forensic data on you is already pretty easy to obtain unless you're taking special effort to avoid it being taken. Also when you get arrested they take whatever biometrics they like. The info on you those DNA testing companies are getting is info already easily available to the government. I guess if you're concerned about your DNA being used to tailor ads to you, not just to criminalise you, it could be an issue, but idk I don't think your DNA can really predict what ads will be effective on you.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • privacy@lemmy.ml
  • incremental_games
  • random
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •