Migrants' DNA is fueling a massive expansion of the FBI's genetic database

gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 122 points –
Migrants' DNA is fueling a massive expansion of the FBI's genetic database
motherjones.com
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You can’t anonymize genetic data because, by essence, it identifies an individual.

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

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

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

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.