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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

> 23andme is little more than a curiosity.

If you call criminal convictions "little more", sure.

Many people consider that a good thing, but I'm not talking about moral valence or vibes - the point is they are an industry supplier of PII that sends people to jail.

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What a strange thing to say. If you committed a crime and the genetic information you gave to some company leaks, and someone is able to use that information to prove you're guilty, what sends you to jail is the fact that you committed that crime. The existence of this company and the leak enabled this particular way of proving you guilty, but you were still guilty, so you might have been successfully proven guilty by other means. But most importantly, you're guilty. You're going to jail because of your actions, and for no other reason. It's not like there's someone out there using this information to frame other people of crimes they didn't do.

>It's not like there's someone out there using this information to frame other people of crimes they didn't do.

pretty bold claim -- as with any additional justice element the innocent will be trampled to some degree.

Here's the thing : it doesn't just open up criminals for prosecution, it also opens up the 23andme population to an even larger arrangement of possibilities for self-incrimination and 'incorrect or misdirected pursuits of justice'.

It's nice that a well known murderer was found out, but the reality of the situation is that we likely wouldn't hear very loudly the stories of innocent folks with cases mishandled by a law enforcement bureaus that were enabled by 23andme or similar services. It looks bad on the law enforcement agencies and it looks bad for the corporation.

>pretty bold claim

I don't think so. How would that even work? It's not much different from framing someone of a crime just by knowing their blood type.

>we likely wouldn't hear very loudly the stories of innocent folks with cases mishandled by a law enforcement bureaus that were enabled by 23andme or similar services

Nah. Let's suppose that someone made a typo and Mr. Buttle is accused of committing the crime Mr. Tuttle, who deposited his genetic material, committed. While the Buttle-genome link is a useful piece of evidence, it's on the judge to request a saliva sample from Mr. Buttle to ensure a trustworthy source of information. If he doesn't, well, it sucks for Mr. Buttle that he got a lazy judge, but it's not on the company. The person who wrote down the name could not have known that information would at some later point be misused to lockup an innocent man.

In this case Mr Buttle would just need to get genotyped again to prove his innocence.

This argument can be generalized against anything police or prosecutors use to convict people. Fingerprints can falsely implicate someone in a crime. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. If we allow prosecutors to present fingerprints or witness testimony as evidence, innocent people will sometimes get convicted. The most effective way to minimize false convictions is to never convict anyone.

Or, you had some connection to the victim or scene of the crime and the presence of your DNA is treated as proof of your involvement, because juries are often swayed by technospeak and irrational arguments.

That jury would have been equally swayed if the sample had come directly from me.

You might not have been a suspect otherwise. If they found DNA of an unknown person at the scene but you hadn't put yours in a database, how would they know who to look for?

If only you hadn't worn that hoodie that made you look exactly like that guy that robbed that convenience store.

Honestly, some of these responses are so strange. It's like these people don't understand that they don't live completely by themselves and that the actions of other people affect them, regardless of what technology exists.

It's not strange. there's abundant evidence the juries are over-reliant on scientific expert witnesses in matters which jury members are not competent to assess themselves, and that this often leads to mistaken outcomes. You probably wouldn't be convicted just because you had a hoodie and jeans on that made you resemble a suspect; the idea that two people dressed in very common clothing might be mistaken for each other is something anyone, even a kid, can understand. But juries are likely to take the opinions of forensic experts very seriously, even when they're not well founded in fact or experience.

https://www.thepmfajournal.com/education/medico-legal-forum/...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4581010/

Now the chances of your DNA being at the scene of a serious crime and you being convicted a a result of a data breach are fairly remote, more the stuff of crime fiction as entertainment. But strange things do happen:

https://daily.jstor.org/forensic-dna-evidence-can-lead-wrong...

Let's start over. You say that if a genetic database didn't exist you wouldn't have been made a suspect, so I reply with a random example where you could be made a suspect without the assistance of high tech. To keep the hypothetical relevant, in it they take you into custody and take a DNA sample from you to compare against one from the crime scene. Either they get a match and that makes you more of a suspect, or they don't and it doesn't. If they get a match, potentially you'll need to convince a jury that the presence of your DNA at the crime scene doesn't mean you had anything to do with the crime.

I don't see what the existence of the database changes. With or without it there are ways by which you can be linked to a crime you had nothing to do with, and it doesn't seem like it can't be used for anything other than quickly getting a list of people who might have been at a crime scene. The article you linked is not about DNA databases, it's about how DNA evidence is misused by law enforcement. All it says about DNA databases is that black people are over-represented in them.

Sorry your judicial system depends on the savviness of random idiots off the street, but it has nothing to do with whether companies like this one exist.

You seem to have completely missed my point. Of course you could be incorrectly made a suspect without any high tech being involved, it has always been thus. The existence of genetic databases provide additional ways you could incorrectly be made a suspect.

Sorry your judicial system depends on the savviness of random idiots off the street, but it has nothing to do with whether companies like this one exist.

You don't have to opt for a jury trial int he US but most people do. Fascinated to hear which enlightened polity you inhabit that is immune from miscarriages of justice.

You must be quite certain your government will never break bad.

If the argument is "the data controlled by this company could be used by an incompetent judiciary system to punish innocent people, therefore this company shouldn't exist", then you should go live in the wilderness away from society, because there's any number of ways that the illegal actions of those around you could have you accused of a crime you didn't do. Personally, I prefer to recognize that I live with an imperfect system and gamble that I'm more likely to find stability and happiness in spite of that system than completely on my own.

What puts you in jail is the combination of laws and their enforcement mechanism. Having everyone’s DNA makes enforcement of any law (good or bad) a lot easier.

Your argument only makes sense if you believe you are innocent of all present and future crimes, which is an impossible fact to know by the very fact that you do not know the laws in the future.

No, that's wrong. Even if my actions are criminal unknowingly to me, what puts me in jail is those actions. That my actions had consequences that were unknown to me (in this case, breaking the law) doesn't change the fact that they were the trigger of the sequence of events that led to me being in jail. After the sequence started, there could be any number of events outside of my control that could lead either to my very quick prosecution or to it being impossible to ever catch me.

Your last sentence is a counter-argument against excuses for surveillance. "The argument 'you have nothing to worry about if you did nothing wrong' means you think you know what laws in the future will be like." It's inappropriate here because we're not talking about surveillance; we're talking about people who willingly gave out their genetic data to some company. The company did not divulge the data, so this discussion is not about privacy and ethics. Maybe don't tell Facebook everything there is to know about you? Maybe don't send genetic samples to whoever to learn random nonsense that doesn't matter about your ancestry? If you do and it leaks, TS?

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