• @[email protected]
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        59 months ago

        “Oh drat, AviationEast is right! Alright everyone, pack it up we’re not doing this anymore.”.
        -FBI top brass

    • @[email protected]
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      -49 months ago

      I’m genuinely curious, why do you think that? Maybe I’m not familiar enough with genetics, but it doesn’t seem like a huge invasion of privacy.

      • @[email protected]
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        59 months ago

        Genetics ID not only yourself, but your entire family past present and future.

        It’s basically the single most largest invasion of privacy in existence.

  • @[email protected]
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    79 months ago

    … that’s probably unwise. Since we got it though, that’s a pretty huge data set that could probably assist in some useful research, if they wanted to anonymize it and give it to scientists. Or they could just keep it for themselves I suppose, until it reveals new uses.

      • @[email protected]
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        -29 months ago

        You can anonymize anything, you just strip the identifying data out and do not include it when you give the info out. Like scrubbing the metadata off a pic before you post it online.

        The level of discourse in this sub has really fallen off a cliff recently…

          • ares35
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            79 months ago

            and, given enough samples, even those NOT in the database, are anyway by genetic relation.

          • @[email protected]
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            19 months ago

            By that logic you cannot anonymize a pic either. Yet everyone who has their photo taken cannot necessarily be identified in it.

            • Bipta
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              29 months ago

              Anonymized data has long been problematic and you definitely cannot meaningfully anonymize a picture in the truest sense of the word.

            • @[email protected]
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              9 months ago

              Can’t show a proof without doxxing me but I’ve written a patent to anonymize medical data (not genetic) and I’m a bioinformatician working with sequencing data.

              While you could probably achieve reasonable privacy levels by altering genetic data, we shouldn’t play with that under fallacious pretenses.

              You can use that data for medical research, of course… but also population profiling or stratification of customers if you are an insurance company.

        • @[email protected]
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          59 months ago

          So, paternity tests exist. Genetics, once enough data are collected, can absolutely be used to identify people.

          • @[email protected]
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            39 months ago

            Correct. Much like with a fingerprint, with both examples, you can determine with good accuracy if they are the same.

            In addition, as tools are advancing, we can extrapolate with very large data sets to identify you even without having seen your specific code, by tracing commonalities through any relatives of yours that voluntarily or involuntarily submitted their codes. However, this does still require those codes to be identifiable. A randomized set of random people’s codes could not be used for this, anymore than a database of fingerprints where all the labels were deleted could be used. It’s just a bunch of random fingerprints, with no names attached anywhere at all, its just a bunch of bleh.

            So, big concern in the hands of anyone who has not scrubbed the labels all off, which would overall render it much less useful.

        • @cactus
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          49 months ago

          And a lot of “anonymized” data can actually be deanonymized again

          • @[email protected]
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            9 months ago

            True. Another guy also pointed out a pic cannot be truly, fully anonymized, and this is also true. Plenty of nuance in the issue for sure. But it is still, nonetheless, possible to render a large genetic database harmless, if proper precautions are taken.

            edit: Harmless was a poor word. I really just meant it can be rendered useless for identifying specific individuals, and only really able to provide info on broad population trends. If proper precautions are taken, which they are not currently being taken. So, that’s not good.

    • @[email protected]
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      49 months ago

      On one hand, yeah, on the other, you want to discourage people from doing this stuff then saying “welllllll, as long as we’ve already got it…”

  • @[email protected]
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    29 months ago

    Would this help with identification of the remains found along the texas border? there are quite a few unidentified remains found and they are hypothesized to be from this group