Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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What are the risks of sharing DNA? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by Charger8232@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm concerned about the privacy implications of DNA testing services like 23andMe or AncestryDNA. What are the potential risks of sharing our genetic data with those companies, and are there any privacy-focused alternatives available?

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[–] blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

I work with genetic data and this sort of stuff is trivially easy to do in an automated way. They could easily run your variants against a known database such as clinvar and broadly deny insurance for a particular pathology if they wanted to.

If they had access to your non-pathogenic variants it also becomes trivially easy to ID you, as non pathogenic variants tend to be random so more likely to ID a person/sample.