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Comment by ricksunny | Hacker News Reader

TFA’s missing info in between its PR pairing of the unknown biohub with the (much more well known) NIH and DoE is that biohub is a Zuckerberg initiative. So just imagine all your biological data paired inextricably tied on an opt-out-but-cant-really basis with your Facebook & Insta account.

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It was called CZI Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Institure, up until about a year ago.

I don't have a Facebook page, I stopped using it after attending an ML meetup in 2012 and being creeped out by what Facebook was doing with photos, pre-AI.

But I use Biohub resources all the time in my research, and have zero, absolutely zero concern about anything developed at Biohub giving the creepy Meta stuff any extra creepiness. They aren't any more connected than the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute is connected to aviation industry.

I do have concerns about the size of investment, $2B to Biohub is abut much and a waste when it would be better to seed lots of independent labs in academia. This is double the cost of the Human Genome Project but with an undefined and therefore unachievable goal.

So there are lots of very valid critiques of this announcement, but I don't think privacy concerns are among them.

Yea I was thinking about this too. Then I thought about how this will be used elsewhere. Predictive models for mental health conditions, addictions, diseases, etc. strong data to try to exploit for marketing. Then eventually health and life insurance companies will be deregulated enough or be willing to pay the fines to squeeze some more capital that way. And of course one day if we are lucky enough eugenics efforts and specifically targeted bioweapons. Yay

There is no relationship between Meta products and biohub in the way that you are thinking.

Thank you for offering zero evidence to center me as the one who may be at fault rather than engaging with the topic at hand.

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