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Comment by vikingcaffiene | Hacker News Reader

I think the ability to solve a criminal act via the technique described is perfectly valid. It's quite ingenious in fact.

What GREATLY concerns me is the thought of what happens when one of these companies gets down on their luck and sells all this data to an insurance company. Can you imagine what would happen to your rates and coverage if it comes back that your family has, say, a predisposition towards diabetes or cancer? There needs to be legislation enacted to strictly control how this information gets used. Furthermore an individual should be allowed to control how that information is shared and be able to opt out of any scenarios they are not comfortable with. Law enforcement scenarios could be exempt but tightly regulated to avoid abuse.

[edit] - its been pointed out that insurance co's can't do what I am describing (which is awesome btw). I think my point stands about the implications of this data being monetized to our detriment.

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What happens when your sample is contaminated with a criminal's (or future criminal)? What if a clean sample generates a false positive match to something undesirable? What do you do when your erroneous genetic records close off doors or sends you through the criminal justice system? You will be powerless to fix it.

You are at the complete mercy of lab techs not screwing anything up. It's safer not to put personally identifying information into a database.

Remember Annie Dookhan!

I had to look her up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan

She was a chemist at a crime lab who falsified large amounts of evidence.

This is pretty shocking.

> On December 17, Dookhan was formally arraigned on 27 charges—17 counts of obstruction of justice, eight counts of tampering with evidence and one count each of perjury and falsification of records.

> [The judge presiding over Dookhan's case] wrote, "Innocent persons were incarcerated, guilty persons have been released to further endanger the public, millions and millions of public dollars are being expended to deal with the chaos Ms. Dookhan created, and the integrity of the criminal justice system has been shaken to the core."

All of that resulted in a sentence of only three years (Nov 2013 to April 2016).

Wow, I did learn something today.

"In May 2015, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that defendants whose convictions on drug charges were based on evidence potentially tainted by Dookhan can pursue retrials without having to face more charges or tougher sentences."

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to mass release everybody, then have the prosecution retry who they think they can convict?

> Can you imagine what would happen to your rates and coverage if it comes back that your family has, say, a predisposition towards diabetes or cancer? There needs to be legislation enacted to strictly control how this information gets used. __Furthermore an individual should be allowed to control how that information is shared and be able to opt out of any scenarios they are not comfortable with.__

Emphasis mine... because I wonder, even if individuals opt into various things, what about their descendants? It's not too hard to imagine a family tree with people opted-in but a descendant who doesn't want their information to be available -- but the general risks/predispositions would be. I haven't seen anyone talking about the issue of privacy with respect to inheritance yet.

Kind of like how you can “choose” (in theory) not to give any information to Facebook et al, but if your friends and family share their contact lists and email boxes, they get plenty of info on you anyway.

>I think the ability to solve a criminal act via the technique described is perfectly valid.

This would be true if laws were divine instruments of justice rather than poorly crafted, poorly-thought out instruments of social control crafted by the wealthy and powerful to control the poor and powerless. For example, we as a society are far, far better off not having "perfect" law enforcement in regards to drug laws. Solving every drug crime and prosecuting every "transgressor" would result in tens or hundreds of millions more destroyed lives and families, with absolutely no positive benefits to society. There are very good reasons to ensure that the power wielded by agents of the state is finite and limited, even (or especially) if it means that many "crimes" are not solved.

We are absolutely on the same page about the draconian nature of US drug laws.

I think there can be a middle ground. The GTK being caught and brought to justice for instance. That is a concrete example of the good that can come out of this. A monster like that is an affront to society and he needed to be caught if only to show that there can be some justice in this world.

Someone posted a comment above mentioning Annie Dookhan which is an example of how wrong this can go. I think any rational person would be terrified of something like that happening to them. I certainly am. I don't think a blanket ban is the answer however. That would result in many egregious injustices to go unpunished as well. Any application needs to have a robust set of checks and balances in place. That really goes for any law enforcement investigative action though. No matter what we do there will be issues. I don't there is anything to gain on either end by trying to make this a zero sum game.

What you describe is the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA)

http://www.ginahelp.org/GINAhelp.pdf

Just a note that GINA doesn't apply to life insurance and mainly covers health insurance and discrimination from employers.

>  They  do  not  apply  to  life,  long‐term  care,  or  disability insurance.

Universal health care

Doesn't solve the problem. Banks will care about this, employers and even landlords would care about this stuff.

Of course they will care, the point it to find solution to make it doesn't matter however they use the information. In case of universal health care, it doesn't matter if insurance company exclude you for pre existing condition or whatever, universal health care will cover you.

>Can you imagine what would happen to your rates and coverage if it comes back that your family has, say, a predisposition towards diabetes or cancer?...

Too late.

They already know this. The DNA would only verify the findings they've teased out of the mountains of data they have on us presently.

Current US law is that the insurance company can consider age and tobacco use.

That's it.

Good chance it won't last though.

I did not know that. :-)

You get what I mean though. This is valuable data that can be exploited.

> There needs to be legislation enacted to strictly control how this information gets used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...

This protects only against use by health insurers.

If you're applying for life insurance, and you've had genetic testing done (like 23 & me), you have to reveal that fact and provide the results if asked. [1]

[1] http://cbslocal.com/2018/01/18/taking-ancestry-test-makes-bu...

> What GREATLY concerns me is the thought of what happens when one of these companies gets down on their luck and sells all this data to an insurance company.

What reasons are there that a company has to go down on their luck to do this?

>>what happens when one of these companies gets down on their luck and sells all this data to an insurance company

If it's not illegal already it can be made. No serious company will even wonder about the what-ifs then.

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