If nothing else, I'll serve as a cautionary tale against this if something happens to me as a result of having my DNA publicly available to all.
Language models are pretty good at looking up and testing SNPs, but even that has low utility for me. Haven’t found a good use case for it yet.
I paid $2k at the time. Sequencing cost has fallen quite a bit but still has quite a bit to go.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/getting-over-the...
My daughter, and any potential subsequent children, are also fully sequenced but that cost more: $2500/embryo through Orchid Health. Preimplantation testing is valuable.
One is alterable, the other isn't ..
(DNA isn't as alterable as pics of your private bits, or even your actual private bíts..
Or we would have cured cancer by now. Without either resorting to surgery or diluting the term "biohacking")
I agree DNA isn't that culturally relevant to an identity but that just seems to be due to anti-intellectualism
Separate from the idea that the easier to alter something is, the more it should considered as a healthy part of identity..
I think that the actual reason is that we know that a person isn't determined by their DNA alone, but there are many epigenetic factors at play, like the environment a person lives in while growing. Why you say it's due to anti-intellectualism?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118970843.ch...
So it should be at least "50% relevant"?
Anti-intellectualism.. meaning the idea that "common sense" is all that is needed to understand or work with the "self", no need to venture near abstract/symbolic models of "objective reality"
I do think altering epigenetics is the most efficient way to improve character-- but that some people don't think about this way is imho a sign that they don't think biological abstractions should be relevant to their everyday life :)
The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking.
Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do.
There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could.
It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.
Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real.
Same for DNA then.
>Same for DNA then.
There's a world of difference between cloning a fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like fluids), and this technology.
The air might carry the particulates to areas never traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints.
Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling to a different city could imply that thousands of people have gone to a city they never went to before. Not happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA.
The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless for court, and more easily game-able than any other biometric by a lot.
To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
It might see use in forensics to generate leads when investigating something. But agreed that on the whole it doesn't make much sense when compared to cameras and cell phones.
The airborne stuff just spreads by itself. To far more places, far quicker, all the time.
My point isn't that this isn't a biometric or something.
My point is that it is the weakest biometric, full of noise, constantly contaminated, easily forged with no skill set or technology required, with a very high false-positive rate when used for anything privacy-related.
There are so many more things (technology, policy, etc.), literally violating people's right to privacy at this very moment, that trying to spin this as a theoretically privacy-damaging technology strikes me as a bit ridiculous.
Also, if with p=0.99 you were at the strip club yesterday evening, then you have something to explain.
No, no it isn't.
Cameras, license plate readers, air tags, phones, literally just stalking someone, and that sort of thing is great for tracking people.
They are easier, vastly less prone to false positives, etc. Your wife/husband isn't going to use a DNA air sniffer to figure out if you were at the strippers. They'll just follow you from a few car lengths back, or ask one of your friends, etc.
And if your concern is government, there are way easier, scalable, way more accurate ways to invade your privacy that are already proven to work and have the infrastructure already setup.
They'll just send a half-dozen masked men to disappear you and then say to anyone that asks that you were an illegal immigrant with an unpaid parking ticket from 2005.
All of this stuff only matters if they are stupid enough to ever let you see the inside of a courtroom. And if you do, you're free to raise the obvious, believable defense that this is the flimsiest, most circumstantial of evidence imaginable. If that's the best evidence they have, you should ask for a bench trial, no judge with an above-room temperature IQ will convict you.
That aren't detectable? That you can't easily take precautions against?
If sequencing were cheap then it would be a hidden way to check who was at a venue - better than gait (or other biometric) analysis from video.
For some uses this seems like a revolutionary monitoring technique.
Of course. How do you detect or protect against when the FBI/NSA/three-letter-agency has a warrant for your cellphone (or Google, car, local coffee shop cameras, Ring cameras, credit card, etc.) information alongside a gag order?
How often do you check your cars undercarriage for GPS monitors?
Do you know how many times your car has been imaged by a license plate camera recently?
Again, I'm not saying that this technology is useless. It's just a lot worse, on several dimensions, than technology that is already invading your privacy this second.
If this technology was seriously beginning to be used to track people, a handful of people can thwart it by carrying around an air filter and shaking it every now and again.
still the value of ambient dna statistics seems worth at least some risk.
For example in France, doing DNA sequencing without consent of all parties, is crimimal offense with up to one year in prison! Similar in Germany.
Those laws are designed to prevent paternity tests, but can be appplied very broadly!
We should not necessarily worry about this being used as concrete evidence in court, but about it being an automated way of generating suspicion. I could totally see how such technology could be used to identify people who the police could focus on.
On the other hand, CCTV is probably just as efficient for that, so perhaps this technology won't make it worse.
Primarily though, there are more accurate ways of tracking people at this very moment, which are less prone to false positives, less prone to faking, cheaper, more easily scalable, and are already widely used and accepted in courts.
This offers basically no improvement over any existing tracking technology, with a handful of downsides that the others don't suffer from.
While I think it's good to ask these sorts of questions, they need to be asked within the context of what is already happening. If there wasn't cameras everywhere, ubiquitous and accurate phone tracking, internet connected cars, GPS trackers the size of a thumbnail, etc. then yes, this technology would be concerning. But that's not reality.
Privacy advocates are already looked at with a sideways glance. The least we can do is be responsible on when we raise the alarm. This is not one of those times.
Of course, which is why I never implied that they don't have drawbacks. Just that the drawbacks of this method, in the context of privacy and tracking, are much more numerous.
>And I want to reiterate that you don't know how prone this new technology is to false positives, you don't know how cheap it can be made.
I don't know how cheap it will be, that's true (it's probably more expensive, in time and money, than an air tag or pin camera). But it is pretty easy to figure out that this will have more false positives than every other current tracking method. Give me an air filter and 30 minutes to walk through a store, and I can make it look like dozens of people were in places they never were. That's not an issue with any other method, especially considering the effort to produce false positives by a bad actor is ~0.
>Just to illustrate, instead of figuring out how to put concealed cameras in the entries of a building, could it be enough to place a small device near the ventilation exhaust fan?
Even if we ignore the false positives and difference in cost, this wouldn't let you pinpoint timing, any other information about the person that might be valuable (who else was with the person, what they were wearing, etc.), has a risk of contamination, doesn't have the ability to give real-time results, no option of capturing audio... Probably several other downsides I'm not thinking of immediately.
Again, I'm not saying that this technology is completely useless. Just that, compared to all of the technology already invading your privacy, this technology is a large step backwards in practically every privacy-related metric.
Raising a fuss about stuff like this is how ordinary people get fatigued by "privacy nuts" and stop caring about the dozens of technologies and policies which are significantly worse, which are already invading our privacy.
Yet we still fear face recognition based surveillance.
Faking a photo, convincingly enough to pass forensic scrutiny, requires skill, time, and equipment. Faking the results of this DNA vacuuming requires no skill, significantly less time, and the only equipment is an air filter.
I can go on, but I have a sneaking suspicion you're just trying to be contrarian rather than actually care about privacy.
It reminds me of the systems that were used to collect MAC addresses of phones.
Think of DNA as a cookie that you cannot delete or change.
The world is wired. Is bathed in wi-fi waves. It is also full of smell.
Eve and Adam meet at a party. Both are good looking, the kind which is so clean that it looks almost puppet like.
When Adam sees Eve and approaches her, Eve is at first welcoming. Her sniffer ring sends her a message. (The sniffer ring is just a ring with a feather moving somehow between a dog tail and a butterfly wing. It is of course connected to the wired/wifi network.)
The message reads: "Adam has a very bad form of cancer. Is not good genetic material to mate with".
As the polite behaviour rules dictate, Eve forwards the notice to Adam, maybe as a visual message, or as a message which appears on his health wristband, then she moves away, looking for other interesting people.
Adam is only mildly concerned. He contacts, privately, his internet+health insurance provider and files a bug request. Then he goes along with the party.
The next scene happens somewhere far, visible from the external conditions (like for example it is day there, while at the party place was night) and from the people in this scene (for example while Adam and Eve might be porcelaine figures, maybe blonds, or maybe japonese, the guys in the new scene are more like indians or pakistani.)
So these are a bunch of Mechanical Turks in a internet cafe like place in India (for example). They receive Adam's bug ticket. We can see one of them, or several doing various stuff on their not so modern computers, but one of them opens on his screen Adam's request.
We can see that the screen has two windows open, one is a REPL Lisp window, the other is a molecular simulation. (This is a hook for a technical audience, important as any hacker movie screenshot.)
On the Lisp REPL there is an error message. The Mechanical Turk fixes it, then runs a molecular simulation. It works.
He then opens a smell convertor. (Variant, he opens "Nozzle", which is just like Google page visually, he searches for a RNA like word, then he hits enter.) Job done.
The third scene is Adam bedroom. He sleeps, not at all concerned, something between a puppet and a child in his bed.
Travelling to a detail in his room, which looks alike the sniffer ring, only that it is a wifi router with a feather. Lights flicker and the feather begins to swosh.
Travelling to the health bracelet of Adam. Shows: "Bug request solved. Status: healty".
The night is quiet and peaceful. The sunrise begins. Adam dreams something nice.
End.
Privacy of what places you visit is already pretty much dead. We're the last generation who lived like that.
I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that it is, and we have to adapt.
For anyone wondering how this works: the cellular modem is a separate general-purpose computer that runs code from the manufacturer and the service provider, the only thing needed to allow tracking a phone that's off is circuitry to allow the modem to draw power independent of the rest of the phone.
I guess a faraday pouch might be helpful, but I recall reading these aren't really as effective as many people believe.
I guess the gasket let enough EM through?
Amusingly, crumpled aluminum foil seems to have a better track record.
Same principle applies in the visual spectrum.
Like, I get it. The argument that "maybe the tech will be used for good" is an easy one to make. But given how tech is being used more and more for bad these days, surely it's harder to make that moral argument to justify this continued research?
Just because you can come up with one or two good reasons for the tech to exist, doesn't mean you get to ignore the overwhelming amount of reasons it shouldn't.
It meant a group of streetwise punks who used illegal tech and wore the same clothes for weeks on end.
Anyone stylish was a villain, or at least suspect.
I wonder why the cyberpunks became well dressed? Was it the Matrix? Or maybe X-Files?
But if popular media shows cyberpunk aesthetic as chic and cool, now we can sell shiny pants to 20 year olds.
Maybe I'm just extra disillusioned today, but it does seem like mainstream marketing and sales is the death of all things. Now I am become salesman, destroyer of worlds.
Anyone seeking health insurance is probably a bad risk. Thus the groups.
As a child, you won't care.
As an elderly person on their way out, you also won't really care.
Years 20 to 30, you probably don't have anything significant to lose.
50-75, you're probably more focused on being setup for comfortable retirement.
That leaves people in their 30s and 40s, midlife crisis era, you probably have other things on your mind. Kids, hobbies, etc.
If life was may two or three times longer, you might care more since the negative consequences of people sucking DNA out of thin air might affect you for a longer duration, but it isn't. You get maybe 75 good years and that's it. Don't worry about it.
genetic privacy is a good thing but is utterly artificial, we have to create it if we want it.