The article quotes Denver's district attorney as saying that this familial DNA searching is especially good for "cold cases where the victims are women or children". Women or children. We're searching through databases of innocent people's DNA, finding potentially damaging false positives, all because we need to keep women and children safe. Has this guy been binge watching Mad Men?
NOTE: the original submission of this was the fusion.net story. The mods changed it to a wired.com story, then later changed it back to the fusion.net story. It was the wired.com story when ksenzee read it. Only the wired.com story quotes the Denver DA.
Didn't you know? Familiar DNA is only useful when the cold case victim is a woman or child. It's not actually any good if the victim was a man. That's just like, basic science, man.
You are right. The reason behind it is that these companies use mitochondrial DNA for their analysis, which is only passed down from mother to child. /s
You're right that Ancestry.com is focused on mtDNA, but 23andMe actually uses a custom Illumina microarray with autosome, allosome, and mitochondrial targets. Here's a study where 23andMe used their (old version) chips to replicate a bunch of known genetic associations, most of which are autosomal: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...
But they aren't interested in the victim's DNA so that is irrelevant. They are interested in other DNA found at the crime scene, i.e. belonging to the attacker or someone related to the attacker.
Showing the world that you pay constant attention to the safety and well being of women and children is a good way to assert how much of a good, real, honest, straight man you are to society. Along with loudly proclaiming "they should all be shot" whenever the word paedophile is mentioned.
> Did you just go from creating a straw man to a "well, actually paedophiles are kind of redeemable" stance?
No, but you went to a straw man very quickly. In addition, it's clear you don't understand statistics.
First, DNA is often far from definitive. So, if the error rate is 1 in 30,000, you're very likely to get quite a few hits of innocent people when the perpetrator isn't in the database.
Second, people who use "women and children" or "pedophiles" as justifications can generally be considered to be engaging in dishonest behavior. Something that has a logical justification doesn't have to hide behind emotional appeals.
Third, "pedophile" or "sex offender" are terms you can get saddled with very easily in the US for a whole range of behaviors including things like giving a child a lost child a hug to comfort them (oops: now you're a pedophile) or taking a whizz in public (congrats: you're a sex offender).
Finally, even the worst and most guilty among us deserve to have their rights protected because those are OUR rights when WE get accused of something heinous of which we are not guilty.
Please explain to me how I don't "understand statistics." In no way was I addressing or defending the wholesale scanning or mining of data; I was simply addressing uhtred's statement.
Politics is largely the use of emotional appeal in a democracy -- you don't get elected on a stance of "well, if we understand the data."
>Third, "pedophile" or "sex offender" are terms you can get saddled with very easily in the US for a whole range of behaviors including things like giving a child a lost child a hug to comfort them (oops: now you're a pedophile) or taking a whizz in public (congrats: you're a sex offender).
Please, link me to a case in which a person giving a lost child a hug led to charges. I would earnestly like to read it because I think you're being clumsily dishonest.
>Finally, even the worst and most guilty among us deserve to have their rights protected because those are OUR rights when WE get accused of something heinous of which we are not guilty.
And now you're just using a truism as frosting to your argument. You're framing this in a "either you care about paedophiles or you don't care about OUR rights."
>Please, link me to a case in which a person giving a lost child a hug led to charges. I would earnestly like to read it because I think you're being clumsily dishonest.
Pedophile isn't a legal term. Men get "straddled with the term pedophile" for simply being in a playground.
No one gets charged with being a pedophile because being a pedophile is not illegal.
You're replying to someone who replied to statements that I didn't make and hoped to argue using both using emotional appeals ("our rights as people) and against emotional appeals -- "those statistics I read on wikipedia 'win the conversation' because I brought them up first (even though they're not related to your point), which means it follows that I can state my opinions as fact."
"pedophile" refers to someone with primary sexual attraction to children, whether or not they act on that attraction.
Terms like "predator", "molester", and "abuser" refer to someone who takes sexual actions against children.
There is overlap between the groups, but they're not identical. There are celibate pedophiles, and pedophiles who have ordinary adult relationships and keep themselves away from children. And there are predators who aren't specifically attracted to children, but instead are attracted to the power imbalance.
I get the feeling that some people want others to focus on the thought instead of the action, because their own actions are deplorable and they're just trying to convince everyone that their thoughts are pure.
I think people draw the distinction because there's a huge difference between finding someone sexually attractive, and sexually assaulting them. (This applies to attraction to adults, not just children. "I find that person attractive" is very different from "I'm going to have sexual contact with that person without their consent".)
Yes, that's been the case since the predominant alma mater of Hacker News became either Wikipedia State or Reddit University. It's no longer a place for discourse, but instead for people trying to get internet points based on falling back to general, unoffensive platitudes.
Paedophiles only enter popular conversation in response to one doing something unredeemable (acting on their urges). Of course I'd people to get treatment before someone is hurt.
…as oposed to the women who, if there were more of them in significant political positions, would not be predominantly straight and have kids and therefore would not be so defensive of children?
That is the terrifying part. Does anybody known how much data these databases are actually storing about someone's DNA, after processing? I ask because in the case of some forensic DNA matching techniques, the set of possible results is small enough to have birthday paradox problems.
Matching an unknown sample against a handful of suspects is probably fine, but fishing in an entire database of for hits on a set of cold cases? I suspect the probability of finding a false positive grows quickly when the number of possible matches increases.
I've been advocating for a US version of those data protection laws since the mid 90s. Unfortunately progress has been slow, often because of the traditional paranoia about any kind of government regulation.
As usual, we will probably have to wait until a lot of people start experiencing negative effects. Nobody cares until it hurs them personally.
The EU's data protection laws have exemptions for the prevention, detection and prosecution of criminal offenses as well as national security and defense. I don't see why law enforcement in Europe couldn't do the exact same thing as was done here.
Forensic DNA use variable repeating sequences in non-protein-coding sections of DNA. Special chemicals latch onto to each key sequence. The repeat lenghth appears as distance or intensity in a chromatagraph. Enough probes and the chance of multiple matches can be less than the worlds population.
Forensic DNA was developed 30 years ago when actual DNA sequencing was mostly a pipe dream (just short disease areas).
I'm very familiar with the traditional methods of sequencing, including the commonly used forensic techniques[1]. I used to work at a well-known genetics lab way back when everybody used Sanger sequencing. I left right around when the first pyrosequencing machine was available, so I'm not familiar with the newer techniques that were developed after that point.
My question is what these newer methods are storing. Elsewhere in this threat someone mentioned that 23andme was able to inspect >100k SNPs, which would be outstanding data if they can produce it with an acceptable error rate.
> the chance of multiple matches can be less than the worlds population.
See, this is exactly what I was talking about: it depends on what question you are trying to answer. If have a sample from the scene of a crime, we can get very high confidence when matching that sample to even a large number of suspects. The "paradox" happens when you try to ask a different (but related) question that changes the search from one-to-many into many-to-many. Even with a low probability of a match, the larger number of possible matches makes false positives very common.
(if you prefer, when the prior probability is extremely low, testing entire databases will tend to find a lot of false positives)
DNA analysis is a powerful technique, but you still have to be careful to make sure you are asking the right question.
[1] there is viability in how many which unfortunately are somewhat variable, but I'm ignoring that
While I strongly object to mass DNA testing of the type proposed here, the DA's comment should be read in the light of the huge backlog that exists for testing rape kits. Denver, CO's clearance rate is only about 30%, and there was until recently a strong bias towards testing cases involving stranger assault but not assault from family members: http://www.endthebacklog.org/denver
So without endorsing the DA's call, it us based on a legitimate public policy issue rather than purely emotional grandstanding.
The bias against testing rape kits when a family member was the alleged rapist comes from the difficulty of prosecuting cases where both people agree that sex happened, but one says it was rape and the other says it was consensual.
There's not much point testing DNA in those cases because it doesn't help you decide if consent was gained.
I totally agree, but one reason to do so anyway* is because of the non-zero probability that someone who attracts a rape accusation from one person may well predate upon others, sequentially or in parallel. A topical example would be Bill Cosby, who's now accused by some 50 women of sexual assault, many of whom said they kept silent for years because he was so famous and they thought nobody would believe them.
* which is fraught with its own ethical pitfalls re. DNA storage, but is in line with current US legal mores, if not your or my personal ideals on privacy.
Playing the devils advocate here but why keep convicts' DNA forever? Should ex convicts not have a right to privacy? I can imagine they might need some way to keep track of inventory in the prison system but once you've served the time, why keep the DNA? Just to make the cops' jobs easier? If there is a false positive on an ex convict's DNA, it still means we got the wrong guy.
I strongly support fixing the backlog of rape kit testing, and if I thought that's what he meant I wouldn't object. Perhaps he was quoted out of context. What I heard was a very old, very tired, very patriarchal attitude of "join me, fellow men, to protect the women and children!" I am not the kind of feminist who resents a door being held open for her, but this quote rubbed me the wrong way.
You might very well be correct - it's one big downside of DA being an elective office, which is something I'll never get used to. My mind just jumped to the rape kit problem immediately on reading your first post, so I just went with the flow of the intuition.
I am not sure what is intimate partner violence but 40% of victims 'being hit' by their partner are men, and in most cases of 'being hit', women start it - predominantly under the assumption that no one will hit them back because a) they are women b) society still goes gaga after 'women and children' and not men c) in practice women are protected from any consequence of hitting a man but men are by default assumed guilty until proven innocent.
For example, while VAWA talks about non-gendered domestic violence, in practice only one partner is arrested so the other can be allowed to take care of children and in 100% of cases where both parties got into a physical altercation it is MEN who end up in jail and with a restraining order.
In a study from Sweden a few years ago, it showed that women and men report essentially equal amount of violence in the home, which throws a big wrench into the perception of women as the perpetual victim and men as the perpetual aggressor.
But even more interestingly the study showed that men and women choose different method in physical violence, and that has a major impact on injures. Men favors unarmed methods by the use of their hands, while women favor knives or improvised weapons. In average the unarmed method cause more often damage which need the attention of medical help, while armed combat during domestic violence causes more damage in those rare instances where medical help was needed. The explanation for this is that combat with improvised weapons is simply harder to do than unarmed.
All but one of my 8 closest male friends have been slapped by ex-girlfriends. I don't usually see any testimonial for this behavior in statistics. There could be a strong bias against men.
Possible bias in your choice of close male friends? That looks like a little over one data point rather than eight. To counter with one data point, it has never happened to me (male).
Intimate partner violence is pretty much the least likely application I can imagine for a database of random strangers' DNA. What is the scenario? "My husband hit me in the head and I got amnesia, so I don't know who my husband is"?
> the DA's comment should be read in the light of the huge backlog that exists for testing rape kits
Except grabbing DNA information from private companies databases is only potentially useful IF those kits are tested. Testing the kits is orthogonal to clearing the cases.
I think the point is that many murdered women or children are often murdered by spouse or parent. The type of case which can be hard to prove. Perhaps a better quote would be "cold cases which are usually hard to prove"
Not sure why children, but in the case of women, could it be that a male perpertrator's Y chromosome is particularly easy to separate from the victim's DNA?
This is why I didn't use 23andMe's service. Because it's in their database, forever.
I want a genetic sequencing service where they sequence everything, put it on multiple encrypted USB sticks and send it to you. Once you confirm you received your copy, they destroy the backup USB sticks.
They never will store it on some centralized server. It will never end up on some tape backup. They will never have a copy after you get yours.
Then you need DNA analysis software that runs offline.
Most of them won't want to do that although, because it makes them a commodity service.
It's not a consumer product to analyze your own DNA, that's just a disguise. With machine learning and a large enough population size they will eventually be able to determine the genetic markers that promote every disease. Personalized medicine will be the next breakthrough in medicine and human longevity.
This requires them to have everyone's DNA, trait, and medical history on file.
Imho, this crowdsourced data belongs to the public domain. Imagine that the most important research papers were not accessible to the public, while the public contributed to them. Well, that is about to happen.
Indeed! I have always been curious about trying 23andMe, but I was concerned about my DNA being forever stored in a database somewhere. Now my decision is final, I'm never going to use that kind of service.
I think this is going to impact their growth as more people realize the implications. I doubt their recent new investors[0] are happy.
I'm working on an open source DNA analysis framework to solve exactly this problem - everyone should be able to check out their own DNA without paying for it http://genomejs.com/
Sequencing is getting pretty cheap, so I imagine it won't be too long before someone offers an honest, simple business model based on charging a straightforward cost + profit. 23andme, etc, who sequence at a loss and plan to profit by selling the data however they can, are creepy. Add in that they're creating huge new honeypots of extremely personal information begging to be stolen, and I can't imagine using them.
You couldn't. But if they advertised their process of how they do it technically, especially the no server part, then the likelihood is far less.
It would be better than 23andme saying that they store it forever in their T&C, and advertise how great it is that it's in their servers basically forever.
True, but that's actually a very significant barrier to getting my DNA compared to having it sitting in a massive database that a cop somewhere can query.
Currently it is a very specific operation, but just imagine that in 10-20 years it might be possible to install some kind of very fast DNA scanner at central locations (airports, ...) which scans the air or dust on the floor for traces of DNA.
Currently it sounds a bit scify-ish but I think we might get there in a decade or two.
How long until foreigners are required to leave a DNA sample at US immigration checkpoints at airports when entering the US? Fingerprints have already been collected there for a long time.
Or just bring back the TSA air puffer machines (rev. 2), and say you're doing it to keep people safe from known terrorists with fake ID whose DNA you have on file. You'd have a full-population genetic database in no time, matched to identifying information, passport/license numbers, and travel history.
That incurs a lot of R&D costs and costs of installation, and people might not be okay with such a thing happening because it affects everyone. On the other hand, querying a DNA database doesn’t face much resistance because it only affects a small number of people.
That's a fun (and scary) thought. Thankfully we're not there yet. When we do get there I hope we'll have the same privacy concerns as we do today for these online databases.
It doesn't invalidate the current concerns, though.
"check this box if you want to see close family members in this search program." It's your choice whether or not you do. If you can't handle the truth, if you're going to use that truth and act on it and ruin your life with it; that's your prerogative.
Can't blame them for telling you what you asked for.
As a counterpoint I found out who my dad really was after using Family Tree in an effort to find relatives of who I thought my dad was. Anecdotal but for me it was quite useful.
I would assume millions are traceable through 23and me simply because they can be "triangulated" via their relatives. Even if you don't use 23andme your genetic data may well be out there.
I try not to use offensive language on HN, but are you fucking kidding me? You actually expect a single company out there to not keep your personal information? The type of system you are looking for will never exist. Ever. The only reason a company wants your DNA to begin with is either to profit from its data, or to perform crowd-sourced research that requires keeping your information indefinitely. Your comment goes far and beyond a fantasy. There will never be anything positive to gain from having your DNA analyzed. Corporate, hospital, "non-profit"... there is no such thing as a secure outlet from whom to obtain your DNA profile. There will always be a record, even if it's "erased" but still recoverable from the raw disk. Either you don't understand how corporations and modern government work, or you are insanely naive about the possible benefits from DNA analysis compared to the politicians and corporate psychopaths who will find a way to benefit from it.
If you're willing to hand over your biological fingerprints to anybody, you may as well walk into your local police station and admit to a murder you haven't committed. Even if 99.99% of people submitting their DNA for analysis never see any negative consequences, the other 0.01% are going to have their lives ruined because of some supposed family association to a criminal. These days, suspicion is equal to guilt beyond a doubt. If one out a million people are falsely chased down based on something like DNA, that is one person too many.
The possibility that you have some horrible abnormality that can be detected via DNA testing is so astronomically low. Stop thinking about the interesting science behind what you can learn about your body. Instead, be very concerned about the fact that there are people out there interested in nothing other than having power over others. Nobody should be submitting themselves to this horrendous risk.
I cannot imagine how someone would even consider submitting themselves to such a process. I took a season pass to my local amusement park; they strongly suggest you provide your thumbprint instead of taking a photo for your ID. It's insane. Obviously the police or state government can force this park with hundreds of thousands of fingerprints to submit to database searches. Who the hell offers to provide their fingerprints to an amusement park, in order to save the 5 minutes of inconvenience required to go have your photo taken? "Stupid sheep" is the only phrase that comes to mind.
"I try not to use offensive language on HN, but are you fucking kidding me? You actually expect a single company out there to not keep your personal information?"
Yes, I do, actually. This kind of response is exactly the kind of attitude that perpetuates the fly-by-night shady handling of our private information that's all too pervasive these days. This bullshit stops only when laws are on the books that bring down the rain of hell if a mere squeak occurs outside regs - HIPPA is a great example of this.
I've had a 23andme test kit sitting in the closet for years now at this point. I never was able to push past the hesitation they would have my data, forever, and would more than likely be persuaded at some point down the road by the almighty dollar to distribute it, as it didn't come with HIPPA protection.
I don't have all the answers, but I absolutely am game for being a part of the solution.
> This bullshit stops only when laws are on the books
Absolutely. Handling personal data[1] absolutely must carry liability. If you move customer data as a black box, common carrier style, then your liability can be limited to a refund. If, on the other hand, you inspect the data in any way, then you're liable for that happens to and everything derived from that
This idea that companies can gather all the data they want without any consequences for mishandling that data is patently unethical.
[1] all personal data, not just "personally identifying information". 2nd and 3rd parties do not get to make the decision about what data is important.
This title is inaccurate and misleading. The cops searched a publicly accessible Ancestry.com DNA database. Ancestry.com did then hand over the individual's name after receiving a court order. It also later shuttered the public database as a result of learning that cops were using it in this manner.
There is no allegation in this article that 23andme or Ancestry.com has turned over private DNA information (although it's certainly plausible that this has occurred or one day will occur).
I have pitched to 23andme a few times over the last few years that they should accept Bitcoin, and offer totally PII-free purchases. This is a great use of a cryptocurrency to my mind; a legitimate good which one should in no way attach to one's identity.
I would use that service. But, I would never, ever send them my DNA attached to my identity.
Sounds like I can't be the first to use Bitcoin with them either, come to think of it..
> But, I would never, ever send them my DNA attached to my identity.
Your DNA IS your identity, and sending it to them is sending them all the information ever needed to identify you. For an encore you are also helping to identify your parents and your children and other relatives to a lesser degree depending on how far they are removed from you in the family tree.
That there is a name and a social security number attached to your DNA right when you send it is a convenience, not having that information is not an obstacle if any of your family members are also 23andme customers.
The only way this would work is if everybody sent them anonymous samples and 23andme would destroy each and every sample after receiving and processing it and destroy any and all records created as a result of processing that sample. No way they'll do that, and you could easily argue the only reason they exist is to build up that database.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago in some more detail:
>> But, I would never, ever send them my DNA attached to my identity.
> Your DNA IS your identity, and sending it to them is sending them all the information ever needed to identify you.
Not really: in the case the cops already have the DNA but it's useless to them because they don't know how to find the person it belongs to. If the cops found an (erroneous) match to sequence done anonymously, they would learn little to nothing that they could act on.
Now the game might be up if they got a family-member match on a non-anonymous relative, but there's little you can do about that.
I don't think so. Even if you never submit a sample, your bother could, and then they could get a match that tells them the DNA is from a sibling of your brother. It wouldn't finger you, exactly, but it would get them very close.
DNA is a subset of your identity. It would be extremely challenging to differentiate two clones who had been raised in similar conditions. This may not be an unrealistic situation in the future.
For every rule there are exceptions, the number of identical twins is so low that for most practical purposes it does not matter. Unless you're a magician (see 'the prestige').
that doesn't make any sense. DNA is not one's identity as in the metaphysical sense of a whole "self". DNA is just like fingerprint but more complete and more (?) unique. By your argument, your picture + some unique number could be your identity -> your driver's license is not your identity. It's a way to identify your identity.
So is my password my identity? Well, of course not.
But it has great potential to identify a person.
For example when you do not use an unique password (but perhaps falsify other personal information) for two separate user accounts.
Then your password can be used to relate two separate accounts together. This kind of interlinking is common practice in the industry for fraud detection and could be used for more sinister purposes.
But lets assume that you actually share your password with your mother and only flip some number of random bits in it (you can see an analogy with DNA).
Now assuming that your mother identity and password is known and you are only child in the family, your identity is also known given your password because there is fixed change distance between your and your mother password.
So I would say based on this that actually DNA is less unique than a fingerprint (assuming that there is no detectable correlation between parent and child fingerprint).
Ooh, this is such a good point that I hadn't thought about. You would want everyone related to you to do this, too. And of course, no matter how hard you work, you won't be able to catch dad's secret attic family, or your surprise second cousin.
I'd like to impute more health and longevity goals to 23andme than just imagine it's a giant government DNA-gathering corporation. But, I bet you're right -- it's just not tenable to hide enough information about myself AND all my family members that I couldn't be ID'ed by a junior data scientist / low-end neural network.
You got it. That's the whole problem with all these partial DNA databases, it's a matter of time before they get combined and then your future relatives are no longer anonymous either. It's a real hornets nest. That's why I'm against taking DNA from inmates, it not only takes their DNA but their extended family is immediately partially identifiable as well and they get no say in the matter.
If the DNA services become popular enough, your identity might be deduced from your family members' DNA. There have already been a number of real-world stories where people used DNA in unexpected (and legally questionable) ways to identify people or relationships, including using family members' DNA as a starting point.
There's also already some research with positive results about deanonymizing DNA:
The former is based on trying to use known data about family relationships to figure out who someone could be, while the latter is based on trying to figure out what someone would look like (or what other observable properties they could have) based on their DNA and then recognize them in a database of anonymous DNA samples.
While both of these studies have pretty significant constraints on the ability to do this kind of deanonymization in a general way for large databases, I think the power of DNA deanonymization will only grow as DNA databases and publicly available family tree records get larger, and as people learn to predict more and more phenotypic traits from a DNA sequence.
Right. You'll use bitcoin! They won't know anything about you, except your gender, eye color, hair color, and that you're definitely related to Max Schubert, Adelaide Schubert, Jane Schubert, and Bob Schubert, all of whom reside in Little Rock, Arkansas and who did the "normal" DNA kit a few years ago, or a few years from now.
I proceed with my charge and got the spit kit. Then a friend told me "it's pretty much a Google-owned company", so that was enough for me to change my mind.
I was still intrigued what they might find about me, so I asked 23, before sending the kit back, if I could actually cancel the order and re-order, but use my friend's credit card, with their permission of course.
23 responded that I can cancel, of course, but they do not allow to use someone else's CC, whether with or without their consent. I asked "why", and was told that "we need to identify the spit with the owner". God knows for what, but latest news that 23 is okay to share your DNA with insurance companies (I can bet bottom dollar they won't share it for free!) makes much more sense now, after all.
I cancelled my order and send the kit back, but I wasn't done quite yet. From $99 order, I only got $45 back. I was told that "the kit cannot be reused, so it has to be thrown away". So I said: fine, give me the kit I paid for back, and keep the remaining $. They refused, and continued to refuse to refund the remaining portion of my charge.
Eventually, a credit card chargeback dispute that they lost took care of it and after recovering all the costs, I emailed all my friends never to do a mistake and give your business to 23andMe.
Why would you expect all of your money back? On top of the wasted kit, there's shipping, handling etc. You are of course allowed to withdraw from your decision, but it's unreasonable to expect the other party to fully cover the cost of you changing your mind.
Most businesses using credit cards in USA are "in retail business", which means that "client is always right" (even if they're not).
Google or 23andMe is not different when it comes to work with Merchant Service Provider. And not many know that in the USA, most MSPs require company they provide CC services to, to respect a refund request despite what their TOS says. Most companies will tell you they don't accept refunds but that's not true according to their MSP statement.
Frankly, I couldn't care less what is unreasonable or not, given that 23andMe already accounted % of refunds/chargebacks they encounter into their services' price.
ps. The kit wasn't wasted. It came in hard to forge metalic-type bag with some sort of hologram on it. The kit wasn't even unsealed.
On the positive side, it's better to be a janitor than be unemployed. It's never a good feeling to lose a job, even if you're "just" swiping the streets.
A lot of legal reasoning w.r.t. DNA has been too quick to equate DNA with fingerprints. Obviously, DNA contains far more information than fingerprints, to the point where it literally contains an entire copy of you. I cannot believe how blatant the violations of our rights are these days, and how passive people are in the face of this new dimension of intrusion.
This shit really pisses me off. The state supreme court found California's collection of DNA samples for people _arrested_ but never charged or convicted to be unconstitutional. Apparently, that ruling has now been overturned.
Please fight law enforcement's new encroaching on our rights. We are now safer than we ever have been and yet the government STILL wants more power.
I was just being brief. It contains an entire blueprint of your biological morphology to a degree of accuracy that given appropriate measures could be used to construct an identical twin with identical susceptibility and predisposition to disease, ability, intelligence, to the extent that those are determined by genes. That includes a number of very private things, from everything to susceptibility to certain mental diseases to penis size.
And no, the government shouldn't get to know any of that about you without a fucking court order.
If the government really wants your DNA it isn't hard to obtain legally. They'll just follow you around everywhere until you leave behind your DNA and then grab it. They'll wait until you drop your coffee cup in a public trash or spit on the ground or leave behind a cigarette butt. Many crimes have been solved this way.
>Suppression issues. (a) Physical evidence. Bly argues that the method used by the Commonwealth in obtaining his known DNA sample constituted a nonconsensual seizure and thus violated his rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, under art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights and under the search warrant requirements of G.L. c. 276, § 1. The judge denied Bly's motion to suppress on this issue, finding that the cigarette butts and water bottle seized by the police constituted trash that was abandoned by Bly.
>We find there is no inherent privacy interest in
saliva. Certainly the nonconsensual collection of blood or
urine samples in some circumstances, such as under the
facts of Robinson, invokes privacy concerns; however,
obtaining the saliva sample in this case did not involve an
invasive or involuntary procedure. The relevant question
in this case is whether, when a person licks an envelope
and places it in the mail, that person retains any privacy
interest in his saliva at all. Unlike a nonconsensual
sampling situation, there was no force involved in
obtaining Athan's saliva sample here. The facts of this
situation are analogous to a person spitting on the
sidewalk or leaving a cigarette butt in an ashtray. We
hold under these circumstances, any privacy interest is
lost. The envelope, and any saliva contained on it,
becomes the property of the recipient.
But that requires a significant new effort for each individual. It has been possible to do Facebook-level surveillance for millennia, if you knew who you wanted to follow in advance, and paid someone to follow them. You could even save the information for later use. Facebook essentially pays people in trinkets to surveil themselves, and stores the results forever. The sequencing companies are trying to "unlock value" in an analogous way for DNA.
Why am I arguing with user:pervycreeper at this time on a Friday...sigh...
Yes, development in utero and epigenetics play a very substantial role in 'copying' someone, let alone, I dunno, living your life. That said, fingerprints are not nearly as complete an identifier as genetics. Also, fingerprints don't carry, unless analyzed with chromatography, almost any health information. DNA with have an abundance of health information and your pre-dispositions to certain diseases, your genetic linage and the skeletons in that closet, and the information about the health of your children whoever they may be with. DNA is very much more invasive than fingerprints and gives leverage to those with the money to process that info. Fingerprints say you touched this thing at some point before the print degraded. DNA says your grandfather was a cheating hound-dog and your daughter is very likely to get breast cancer. That data can be much more damaging.
From the original article [1]:
"If the idea of investigators poking through your DNA freaks you out, both Ancestry.com and 23andMe have options to delete your information with the sites. 23andMe says it will delete information within 30 days upon request."
One may wonder if they treat this policy much like Ashley Madison treated their removal promise.
According to a customer rep, the 3rd party company, LabCorp, that actually processes the genotype testing will keep all the data for up to two years regardless of a deletion request.
"Account Closure
When closing an account, we remove all Genetic Information within your account (or profile) within thirty (30) days of our receipt of your request. As stated in the applicable Consent Document, however, Genetic Information and/or Self-Reported Information that you have previously provided and for which you have given consent to use in 23andWe Research will not be removed from ongoing or completed studies that use the information. Our contracted genotyping laboratory may also retain your Genetic Information as required by local law and we may retain backup copies for a limited period of time pursuant to our data protection policies. In addition, we retain limited Registration Information related to your order history (e.g., name, contact, and transaction data) for accounting and compliance purposes.
In our TOS it states, 'Our contracted genotyping laboratory may also retain your Genetic Information as required by local law and we may retain backup copies for a limited period of time pursuant to our data protection policies.'
What this means is the data file generated from the processing is stored, though the sample is discarded shortly after the processing of the sample is complete (if biostorage is declined). This data file is stored for up to two years. National Genetics Institute (NGI), our contracted laboratory, is required to keep the results of the analysis for up to two years as required by CLIA. Under HIPAA, LabCorp (this includes NGI) is required by law to maintain the privacy of our customers. You can read LabCorp's privacy statement here
EDIT: According to someone who currently works at 23andme, they never delete data - ever. On multiple occassions when I bring data deletion up, there's a puzzled look and a quick denial that they ever delete data regardless of customer requests. Which is accurate if you read the above TOS... they only delete data that ties you to your submitted genotype data:
"however, Genetic Information and/or Self-Reported Information that you have previously provided and for which you have given consent to use in 23andWe Research will not be removed from ongoing or completed studies that use the information"
That was my first thought, as well. However, it did say that the FBI agent had a warrant to collect his DNA through a cheek swab and that he would have been compelled to comply had he refused.
This is exactly the type of bullshit I'm talking about when I try to stress privacy to people I know and they think I'm a lunatic. Most people don't want to hear what "could" happen, only what has happened in the past.
And they get all Godwin on you when you tell them that IBM hoarded and then processed census data for the Third Reich in exactly the scenario of:
Hand over information to someone you trust (in that case the Govt. of your country who proclaim that they welcome Jews); someone who wants to use it against not you gains control of it via takeover (in that case a bunch of psychotics who will murder you because in 1933 your grandma ticked "Jewish" on the census form).
It isn't far fetched nonsense, it is tried and tested.
What will be really interesting is when they acquire a sample from someone based on a partial match by a family member to one case, then proceed with an unrelated case based on a partial match to that sample!
> This is not only because of privacy concerns—the people who contribute their DNA to such endeavors, whether medical or genealogical, rarely expect to have their genetic code scrutinized by cops—but also because those databases haven’t been vetted for use by law enforcement.
It's a real shame that behavior like this will stifle progress. I had been interested in doing 23andMe, and now I'm reconsidering it.
Data should have attorney/client privileges. That would solve all this privacy stuff. No, just because the data exist, does not mean you can just have it. If both my attorney (23&me) and I agree that you may use it, then yes, otherwise, no. Never ever ever will you get it and no court can rule otherwise. It's red oculus that we have to be afraid to use all these services because what they might do with our data and who they might sell it too.
On that note, as someone entering the US in a few days, I wonder how long it'll be before they take DNA at US borders. They already take retina, photos and fingerprints.
(I'm not trying to minimize or legitimize this -- I find it very offensive and have planned my own travel to avoid visiting countries where I would be fingerprinted. I'm just pointing out that US-VISIT doesn't currently include a retina scan, at least not routinely at all ports of entry.)
I asked 23andMe if they could somehow anonymize my account and they didn't even seem to understand what I want. They said I could change my username but I wanted a more thorough anonymization. That was a while ago (years), maybe they'll understand eventually.
(I wasn't worried about law enforcement, but I can think of all sorts of undesirable scenarios should their database ever leak, which it probably will).
I bought a kit from 23andMe a few years back and was quite keen to get information on my genetics and health factors. However, I realised by submitting my DNA to them, it would probably go into global dataset for law enforcement. I was ok to do this for myself, but putting you DNA into a dataset like this can also potentially affect your family which is something I didn't want to do.
Law Enforcement Purposes. Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes under the following six circumstances, and subject to specified conditions: (1) as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; (2) to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person; (3) in response to a law enforcement official’s request for information about a victim or suspected victim of a crime; (4) to alert law enforcement of a person’s death, if the covered entity suspects that criminal activity caused the death; (5) when a covered entity believes that protected health information is evidence of a crime that occurred on its premises; and (6) by a covered health care provider in a medical emergency not occurring on its premises, when necessary to inform law enforcement about the commission and nature of a crime, the location of the crime or crime victims, and the perpetrator of the crime.
HIPAA only affects information held by covered entities (mostly health care providers, health plans, and their business associates.)
23andMe, Ancestry.com, etc., are not HIPAA covered entities, and thus HIPAA has no effect on them, even before considering whether the type of disclosure discussed would be allowed if HIPAA applied.
Applying the same standards of health information protection mechanisms fully to authorized guns would require all sorts of other reforms, like drug law: what's to keep a police officer that arrests a corporate executive on cocaine or prostitution charges from dumping stocks on that company? All human activity could be considered "health information" by the issues HIPPAA claims to address with it.
Well - if you have big enough database (of anything) - the Feds will come after it, and the Supreme Court chances of reaffirming 3rd party information doctrine are high.
The other database I really mistrust is medical DNA databases. First because of the reasons mentioned in this article. But also because coming from a family of doctors myself, I know they are computer illiterate, which gives me little trust in their ability to not leak the data in the wild.
It is commonly said that there is a 1-in-a-million chance of falsely matching someone else. I don't know where that is from, but if you're 1 in a million, there are 318 Americans just like you.
"As NYU law professor Erin Murphy told the New Orleans Advocate regarding the Usry case, gathering DNA information is “a series of totally reasonable steps by law enforcement.” If you’re a cop trying to solve a crime, and you have DNA at your disposal, you’re going to want to use it to further your investigation."
If the police broke into people's houses to snoop through their private effects, that would help solve crimes too, but it doesn't mean it's "totally reasonable" -- why is snooping through private DNA records "totally reasonable"?
It comes down to the third-party doctrine[0], which is the same reason the text messages or emails you send are not subject to 4th Amendment protections. While in your home you have an expectation of privacy the courts have ruled that once you release something to a third-party this expectation is not valid.
Correct - their current v4 chip covers ~602K SNPs and they have > 1 M customers, so you couldn't uniquely identify all of them by genotype. But given the frequency of rare variation in humans, you'd expect to be able to reduce a given genotype to a much smaller set of customers.
It only takes about 20 snps to uniquely identify someone. They genotype to the order of hundreds of thousands of them. As far as identification (and the risks of misidentification) go, it's pretty much just as bad as sequencing.
That seems less of an issue about privacy, and more like a case about badly used genetics/statistics. DNA is fallible, at least with the currently used technology, and police have to get that into their heads. It's not the fault of 23andMe or others if police and prosecutors don't understand the implications.
So a sample of your genetic material may already exist in a state government filing cabinet, somewhere. (Your state capital? Each county?)
In California, the retained information and sample can be used "for medical intervention, counseling or specific research projects which the California Board of Health approves" and "anonymous research studies". See the section "Storage and Use of Dried Blood Spots" at:
And the per-disease records are apparently kept for lookup-by-individual without retesting, because there's a routine by-email process for requesting long-ago sickle-cell results (back to 1990) about NCAA student athletes:
And that's not even considering all the health procedures (blood donations, tests, surgeries) or natural shedding (hairs, skin, saliva, excrement) routine in a normal life. You are a firehose of genetic samples, to any even slightly attentive observer, or even passive observers who take an interest some time later.
So: good luck keeping your genes from the state, if it really wants them.
Yet, Women are also more likely to kill there intimate partner. (This flips if you include ex partners.) Which may seem like a surprising statistic, but women often feel the need to use weapons to equalize a physical situation. Which can easily turn deadly.
Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological fathers was slightly higher than for biological mothers.[4]
However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% were killed by males.[4]
Males were more likely to be murder victims (76.8%).[4]
~ 1 in 4 women and ~1 in 7 men will be victims of severe violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes.
> Yet, Women are also more likely to kill there intimate partner. (This flips if you include ex partners.)
When describing a statistic on the internet, especially a surprising statistic, please include a source. We don't know you, so the level of trust we'd have of your statistic is "someone said it on Hacker News", which of course is not very much trust. You might be correct, but others on Hacker News make mistakes, so any sensible person reading that will shrug and think "eh, maybe".
There's a reason he didn't provide a source: because it's not true.
In 2007, 1,640 women were killed by male partners, and 700 men were killed by female partners. [1] and the stats are far, far worse when one looks at non-lethal violence.
The notion that women are more dangerous is a commonly spread mysoginist lie. It's designed to get upvoted by other anti-feminist, anti-woman "men".
For your source The victim has recently separated from the offender. That's the second half.
Note, the stat I quoted included women killing women not just women killing men. Men are also far more likely to kill an ex partner than woman.
As to the sourse, I was on a project dealing with violent crimes in the US army at the time. I remember being somewhat shocked but not the original material.
Edit: I can't seem to find the details, so I am willing to accept I am not recalling this correctly.
I make this comment, rather than just upvoting, because I wish to explicitly encourage on HN the social norm that Retric just displayed, of being open to being wrong.
"Woman" is a very strict and well-defined word but "feminist" not so much, so it entirely depends on your definition of feminist.
If you stand with the dictionary definition of "feminism", that is, the support of equal rights for men and women, then it sounds a bit odd.
If your experience of feminism however is the american anti-male, pro-affirmative-action attitude then you absolutely can be anti-feminism without being anti-women. With good reason, too - "positive discrimination" is a scourge on equal rights, which are at the heart of the first and formal definition.
Obviously one could, hypothetically, believe that "feminism", whatever one intends that word to mean, is harmful or orthogonal to the interests of women collectively.
(I say "whatever one intends that word to mean" because I believe that the English speech community, collectively, uses the word "feminism" to mean a variety of things, and as a good descriptivist, I believe that a word means whatever people use it to mean (and understand by it), and as such believe that it does not have a fixed meaning at this time.)
I don't actually understand how you can ask that question without trolling, though I assume in good faith that you were not trolling.
I think it's a valid question if you are not familiar with extremist-feminism and just go by the dictionary definition of "feminism" == "equal rights for men and women".
I wasn't trolling at all. I was genuinely curious. I knew there were many possible answers, but I was curious as to what the person I was replying to meant by his statement. To me, feminism means that men and women should be treated with equal respect and have equal rights. I wanted to know if the poster had a different definition of feminism, or if they agreed on feminism but thought that it wasn't good for women.
Then I'll answer since apparently it's personal :)
I do believe that men and women should be treated with equal respects (when they deserve it), and have equal rights (which is already the case in Western countries). I don't agree that this should be called "feminism", but english is not my native language so maybe I'm more sensitive to how "feminism" sounds and how obvious it is that it is geared towards women, as opposed to "equalism" for example.
However, feminism (since that's how we'll call it) nowadays has nothing to do with that. Feminism is now, at least for me, associated with laws like "yes means yes", kangaroo courts, "mansplaining", "manspreading", etc. And I do believe that this wave does hurt women. First, it spreads the myth that women can "have it all" (and just to be clear, it is a myth for men as well, nobody can have it all, life is made of choices) which in the end makes everyone unhappy, second it infantilizes women by constantly presenting them as victims who have no control and no responsibilities.
Both of you quoted lethal statistics, which are hardly representative of the majority of domestic violence. In fact, a lot of these studies conflict in data. For example, this study from 2007 suggest that 24% of relationships include some form of violence, and 70% of non-reciprocal violence was committed by women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17395835). Even the term "violence" has different meaning in studies, causing further ambiguity among the studies. It's often twisted to support a premise.
Bottom line, statistics might not represent what you think they do, and just because someone drops different numbers doesn't mean they're malicious. Assuming malicious intent is actually a key behavior in many relationships with IPV, which signals that it's not healthy behavior. It's also a form of fear-mongering, which prevents rational dialogue.
More to the point, there was a far more recent review of studies and literature regarding domestic violence just 2 years ago (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10741752.htm?PID=4...). They mention some of the wide disparity in statistics supplied by different studies (http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/pages/12_page_findings.h...), showing that, for example, different studies have shown both men and women to be perpetrators of IPV between 1-69%, with the majority falling different ways depending on the study and the researchers involved.
More interesting is the fact that their review of these other studies showed that, overall, men and women (both straight and LBGT) have similar perpetration rates. There are some outlying differences in a few classifications (e.g. stalking has fairly similar perpetration rates in aggregate, but males tend to gravitate toward physical stalking). What we see is that the narrative that any one side has significantly more violent tendencies has very little supporting evidence. People who claim otherwise are usually in the middle of some sort of confirmation bias. Often this is based on pre-existing belief or on anecdotal experiences.
In essence, just like we're all equal, we've got a roughly equal distribution of violent abusers regardless of genital configuration. The fact that regardless of sex or sexual preference, the same percentage of people still abuse the people they "love" the most should be a miraculous starting point for a dialogue about equality, needs, relationship education, and violence prevention in general. However, it usually degenerates into finger-pointing like the above because people just can't accept that it's a human problem and not a gender problem.
The Wired story doesn't have any mention of 23andMe in it, so the title is now inaccurate. And now having read the fusion.net story, I think it's a much better article than the Wired one because it covers the angle of each company's privacy policy, their interaction with law enforcement, the introduction of transparency reports, and so on rather than Wired's which only covers the imprecise nature of DNA.
It's a sad comment on HN that the interesting discussion of this is buried under the braying of people of people who would appear to be more at home in /r/mensrights or some similar commune of sex offender apologists and woman-haters.
