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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always found the breathless claims about genetic information being leaked, the shlockiest fear mongering of this data breach.

Seriously. What’s the threat model here? A human clone? Someone hacking a police database to replacing some criminal’s dna record with your record? None of these are plausible.

Even the reporting about compiling a list of people of Jewish ancestry is fear mongering. An antisemitic troll post? Absolutely. An actual novel threat? Well, probably not much more than a regexp and phonebook.

Seriously. Give me a real scenario that has been demonstrated that uses this information in a way that someone with… oh $10 million in resources could do. I’ll wait.

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Immediate threat scenario: Ad targeting based on genetic data that isn't available through other means. For example, discounted plane tickets to Ireland. Aeromexico did a joke ad about this once.

Alternatively, imagine a genetic "klout" type company that harvests such data and is used like a personality credit score. Your employer, university, landlord can check whether you have the right "personality traits" without directly falling afoul of anti discrimination laws.

Notice that the important thing in both of these scenarios isn't whether genetics is truly useful here, it's that people believe it is regardless of actual efficacy. Phrenology and foot measurements were used for similar things decades ago.

Future threat: individualized, immutable presence identification and tracking from eDNA. We can already do this in marine environments and at a species level elsewhere, but it's a very new capability.

Are you in biomedical research? I feel like the answer is no, because if you were you'd understand how fast paced discovery is in biotech these days. Just because it's not a threat today (I agree, it isn't), doesn't mean it's not a threat in a 10 or 20 year horizon.

I agree. If you asked someone at Bell Labs whether the creation of a computer would cause gaming or digital addiction, the thought or idea wouldn't make sense because they didn't know what we know today.

That's great and all but again no genetic data was ever leaked at 23andme but everyone keeps reporting it like this is the information that was accessed by the attackers

Agreed. But I was responding to johnathankoran about whether leaking / releasing your genetic information would even be a potential threat. I think it very well could be in 10-20 years (and possibly much less). Enough of a concern for me that I wouldn't trust a company with that information.

Yup. As soon as I read that they targeted Ashkenazi Jews, I realized this was just consumer reports, not actual genetic information.

No hacker is running nucleobase query.

I was told genetically targeted weapons were just five years away, literally 25 years ago. So forgive me if I seem unduly cynical.

“The BMA has warned that the possibility of developing weapons genetically targeted at different ethnic groups could be just five years away.”

Published Jan 30, 1999

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114775/

If such a weapon was developed, can you think of a scenario in which it's existence would be secret?

No.

That type of total secrecy only exists in bad movies and conspiracy theories.

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