this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Privacy

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I'm concerned about the privacy implications of DNA testing services like 23andMe or AncestryDNA. What are the potential risks of sharing our genetic data with those companies, and are there any privacy-focused alternatives available?

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[–] blackbirdbiryani 2 points 7 months ago

I work with genetic data and this sort of stuff is trivially easy to do in an automated way. They could easily run your variants against a known database such as clinvar and broadly deny insurance for a particular pathology if they wanted to.

If they had access to your non-pathogenic variants it also becomes trivially easy to ID you, as non pathogenic variants tend to be random so more likely to ID a person/sample.