Privacy

31957 readers

376 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

77 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 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.