I do not understand why anyone with tech knowledge would have participated in this honeypot. Please help me understand why there was trust.
There are a lot of lessons to learn from the 20th century, but I don't think "you have to hide your ancestry" is one of them.
I don't understand privacy nuts.
Huge datasets labelled as to ancestry exist, characterizing distributions of alleles that imply "race", which is how Ancestry and 23andme, for American company examples, do some of their analyses.
At least two Nobel prizes were recently awarded, one to Doudna and Charpentier related to Crispr-CAS9 for context-sensitive genome edits, and another for mRNA (which was in development for a decade or so before the entire Covid repurposing arose).
So, I think the part missing, to your point, is the "vector" that would deliver a sequence of patch files, perhaps via CRISPR-cas9 etc, which would perhaps bind to the constellation of race-implication genome sites to collectively build some proteins of whatever sort of interest, whether for fitness repair or fitness reduction in the host.
Race is a proxy variable for genetic history and we have enough genetic history to identify what "race" people belong to, in a computational way, with a great deal of human judgement. Implementing that "logic" in the form of a gene therapy delivered as a virus is much harder. Molecular logic, these days, is fairly simple and doesn't allow us the level of accuracy you would need.
If you don't require 100% sensitivity and specificity the job is "easier". For example, what should your theoretical virus do to people who are children of two parents with very different genetic history? Which "race" do they belong to? And if you go down that path, you're basically going to have to convince your funders (because this would be an extremely expensive research project) that your weapon of mass destruction will likely kill some fraction of allies.
Those are just a couple things off the top of my head; I could write a whole book on how hard delivering gene therapy is.
What exactly is someone going to do with my DNA? Any entity that's a threat to use it for something nefarious is going to get it from me pretty easily. They could grab any number of physical items that I've touched or left my hair on etc.
Should they do a better job of protecting the data? Yes. Am I going to freak out over something that will likely not affect my life in any way? Nope.
Genetic data sounds important but in the bigger scheme of things, it's probably the least manipulatable data about a person on the internet.
My genetic data is less weaponizable than if I uploaded hundreds of pictures of myself and my shared my social graph to Facebook, if I shared my political opinions on Twitter, if I commented/posted on Reddit boards of my interests and hobbies. It's also less weaponizable than the multitude of "invisible" data that I feed to Google, my incompetent local government, service providers, every shop that is shipping something to my home address.
I lose genetic data everywhere I go, every day. 50-100 hairs fall of my head, and I leave fingerprints on everything I touch. I "lose privacy" every day by walking into somebody else's photo/video/TikTok, and by mishandling of it by poor government/business entities.
Life's too short.