• Candelestine@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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.

    • jackpot
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      1 year ago

      ‘anonymise it’ lmfao it’s the fbi

      • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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        1 year 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@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

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

          • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

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

            • Bipta@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

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

            • LaSaucisseMasquee@jlai.lu
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              1 year 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.

        • gibmiser@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

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

          • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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            1 year 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.

    • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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      1 year 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…”