FBI, US g-men tried to snatch DNA results from blood-testing biz. What a time to be alive Not content with snooping on your emails, whereabouts and telephone calls, it appears the Feds now want your DNA results. DNA testing company 23andMe says it has received four requests from law enforcement agencies for "user data" in the past quarter, all of them from the United States. Those stats came in the first " …
"Who'd want to give any US company any sensitive data?"
Well, who would want to give ANY company such sensitive data? They are offering a service that is fantastic and potentially very useful, and in many ways groundbreaking... BUT - It should be a simple case of DNA sample taken, results produced and sent to customer, DNA sample destroyed, their working copy of results deleted. They don't NEED to keep the data.
I also understand that maybe the only reason they can offer such a service at $199 is that they are making money from selling the aggregated anonymous data, but why not have a more expensive option that includes permanent deletion on their side of any working data and destruction of samples?
They are offering a service that is fantastic and potentially very useful snake oil.
FTFY.
"in 2013, the FDA banned DNA testing startup 23andMe from selling its home testing kits as diagnostic aids, saying the company's claim that the kits could predict certain genetic diseases meant they qualified as medical devices and therefore couldn't be sold without strict regulatory oversight" (from here; see also this story)
"Companies selling DNA kits have been deceiving customers with "fictitious" and "misleading" medical advice, an undercover sting operation by Congressional watchdog the GAO has discovered" (here)
And so on.
Besides the suspect budget mass-market analysis services these firms (claim to) provide, there's the extremely dubious nature of the concept itself. Our understanding of the human genome is still extremely limited. The genotype does not by itself determine the phenotype; environmental factors are hugely important, as are the epigenetic mechanisms, particularly various aspects of gene expression, which we're only beginning to understand.
This sort of testing is little better than phrenology. For specific genetic conditions which are strongly linked to specific, identified genes, they may be useful - for example 23andme claims to tell you whether you carry the recessive gene for cystic fibrosis, which is potentially useful to know if you're thinking of reproducing. Regular Reg curmudgeon and contrarian Andrew Orlowski compared this sort of consumer genetic testing to homeopathy, in one of the articles linked above, and that might be a bit extreme. But on the whole it's a rather dubious service and very much prone to misinterpretation by non-expert consumers.
I think it's appropriate. They take DNA samples by force, without consent. They tried to do this to entire schools full of kids.
They take samples from bystanders and witnesses, by force and without consent. And they keep them forever and refuse to destroy samples taken from innocent parties and children.
It's a fair description.
For the heinous and dangerous crime of telling a traffic warden to fuck off, I was told that they were taking a DNA sample anyway...I could either co-operate, or they would use a tuft of my hair removed by force and slap an assault charge on in addition.
It was absolutely not by consent; it's not something I can ever get back; and now that information is out there in the hands of irresponsible cunts to do who-knows-what with. And can be used as a weapon against my children; grandchildren and other relations. All done by the very organisation who are -in theory- there to stop abuses of power of this kind.
I didn't use the term to cheapen the experiences of sexual assualt victims; but rape is exactly what it was.
@moiety - Whilst I emphatically agree with you that what you experienced was completely uncalled for and unecessary in any civilised society, and I applaud your comment about not wanting to cheapen, etc... nevertheless I'd much prefer that some term other than 'rape' were used.
Call me biased if you will, but it's very noticable to me how readily and casually that word is bandied about by those (of either gender) who haven't been the victim of sexual assault - and how carefully and seldom it is used by those that have.
You had a shocking experience, moiety, and I respect that. But it wasn't rape, and needs a different term than one that implies sexual physical assault. I don't ever wish to have my DNA stolen and misused - but better that than rape.
@Esme - Fair point; but I really can't think of another term to describe it. Even now -a decade later- I'm incandescently pissed off about it; feel betrayal from an attack from a completely unexpected direction (like being savaged by a family pet...the exact opposite of what they're there for); and feel shame that I didn't fight back; assault charge be damned. Then there's the powerlessness of being fucked over by people just because they can and because they have enough time to be vindictive on that particular day. It shares a lot of the same qualities then -if not degree- and my use of the term was shorthand, if you like, to save everybody several pages of -technically more accurate- ranting. If I have caused offense, then it was not intentional and I apologise.
@Doctor Syntax - Evidence had nothing to do with it. My offence was telling the traffic warden to fuck off; which I freely admitted (and am happy to go on public record and state categorically that the officer concerned can still wholeheartedly and completely fuck right off). I was busted on a public order offence, because the officer claimed to be distressed, harassed and some other word; which makes it a criminal offence; and thus comes with mandatory DNA theft. That the officer felt these things while following me around harassing me is not a factor in the law, apparently.
@moiety - nope, no need to apologise to me, m'dear, no offence caused, due to the careful way your post was worded, though it did make me wince, but hey, that's going to happen now and then. And I understand re 'shorthand'. I also absolutely understand re being powerless in a situation with potentially serious life-consequences - I've had stuff like that happen to me as well ,and with less justification on the part of those doing me wrong. I'd suggest sticking with the word 'abuse' though.
Anyway - have a beer!
What's really puzzling me is those who downvoted me on this occasion. Downvotes are water off a ducks back, m'dears, can't imagine what you hoped to indicate downvoting me on THAT one, unless it's either your ignorance or troll creds. Heaven knows there are other posts of mine that deserved downvotes more than that one did! 8-} Right, it's just about cuppa time here, I'm off!
@Esme - Apologies for making you wince, then. You posted while I was typing out the above, so I wasn't addressing you then. That's the problem with words; especially if you're dealing with anything emotive...the same word can have different shades of meaning for everybody. 'Abuse' doesn't really do it in context because that's way more ambiguous; with meanings ranging from the sort of thing I meant; through neglect and down to self-abuse; which is awesome.
Which leaves the choice of either avoiding any word or subject which can possibly cause offence (which is most of them, probably); or trying to use context to more precisely get a specific meaning across; which is what I attempted.
I was a bit mystified by your downvotes too. Possible theories:
-Anal retentives who were marking on correct usage (it's an IT site, after all)
-Automatic internet disapproval of Social Justice Warrior-ism
-Anti-censorship types
-Old-fashioned sexism
For the record, I hadn't voted in this thread except just now to level you up a bit and a downvote for the chap who wants me to kill myself, because fuck that guy.
Instead of getting all shirty with a traffic warden who was probably just doing their job, perhaps you might want to learn how to park? Properly. It's not just about stopping. Do you find you are featured on YPLAC?
That you even defend the use of the term rape for what you say happened to you really does suggest that you don't have the faintest idea of the what the real world impact of such a horrific act it actually is. Have you considered suicide? Down not across? Perhaps help it on with a warm bath.
Rape is not what you experienced.
That you even defend the use of the term rape for what you say happened to you really does suggest that you don't have the faintest idea of the what the real world impact of such a horrific act it actually is. Have you considered suicide? Down not across? Perhaps help it on with a warm bath.
Did you really just urge me to top myself because I wasn't being politically correct enough for you? That is....special.
Let's talk about words for a moment. The word 'coffee' to pick a less contentious example can be used to describe freshly ground filtered coffee; freeze-dried instant coffee and whatever the fuck it is that they serve at McDonalds. Same word; entirely different experiences and meanings. Rape, if you look it up, has a bunch of different meanings covering not only the sexual act but also the plant; an archaic use that means kidnapping; but also to describe plundering, violation, despoiling, and abusive or improper treatment. It was these latter, secondary meanings I was trying to convey and there simply wasn't another word that would accurately describe my feelings on the subject. And the initial reference was phrased to eliminate the primary meaning, in context.
"moiety you lightweight, you don't know what real oppression is" is the unspoken subtext of a few of these comments and that is true. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time and place and with the skin colour to avoid many of life's harsher lessons. That and the simple expedient of not being naughty enough to appear on the radar kept me sheltered -and indeed naive- for quite some time. Which made it all the more shocking when I finally did see behind the mask.
I'm paranoid and couldn't -and still can't- adequately convey the horror that I feel in having the most personal information I have taken by force. With no controls; limitations of use; no guarantee that it won't be used to oppress my children; nothing. Being branded a criminal; finding out that the police can't be trusted; and finding out that being innocent doesn't matter a damn in court were just icing on the cake, really. Now a DNA database could be used for good - lessening of crime; medical advances and so on; but you only have to read a random sentence from the likes of Teresa May to realise that that probably isn't the way things are going to go.
No suggestion that *you* might want to commit suicide. However it is a sadly common feeling for those who have received more invasive experiences. Still, this is all about you, isn't it. You just can't park can you? :-)
Your horror just doesn't register on the scale of someone who has been sexually violated. You are obviously a troll. I welcome the collection of your DNA so it may be observed and traits tracked throughout humanity. Perhaps warm baths should be offered after all. Sad, isn't it.
See you around, perhaps next Tuesday?
This post has been deleted by its author
Title (singular), hmm yes, I typed it in, once. No need to be excited by that.
Yesterday I changed the direction of my bicycle so as to avoid a small animal on the road - in doing so I may well have experienced an accident (cars hurtling past etc.). I presume, as far as you are concerned, that makes me a hero (self sacrifice in the presence of danger etc).
"hero" - "rape" equivalence - it's all a matter of scale, isn't it? I'm not a hero, you weren't raped.
Oh, and goats, yes I like them. Cooked properly (takes a while!), with a good bit of fresh English mustard, they are quite appetising.
Next Tuesday?
Governments and law enforcement agencies in particular believe that their goals trump any rights to privacy of any kind for any person.
That is the underlying problem with all of this.
When you have legislation that uses terms like 'reasonable' you are always going to run into a problem because that is a relative term and can be played with by these agencies because, as stated, they think invading privacy is reasonable.
"Nice idea but for the most part, impractical. Lawsuits cost money "
If this were evidence that the prosecution were attempting to put forward for a criminal offence you'd be in court anyway. They'd have to prove reasonableness in order to get the evidence in. I don't know about US criminal proceedings but I hope that's how it still works hereabouts.
Possibly a bit missed-a-joke confused here, I could have sworn that was meant to be "horse" not "whores" or is that a washing sound I hear... ;)
(as opposed to whooshing, yes, geddit? *sigh*)
I agree with the sentiment, but the presumed accidental misquote just sounds weird, to bring hookers into it if there's no blackjack.
... they forgot to mention NSLs and gag orders. No wonder, that.
On a side note, American TV series have been depicting American agencies having access to everybody's genetic data for years. Was that a way to soften the public on this issue before it became publicly known? Or just another case of nature imitating art?
Yes, the Usry case is pretty disturbing. IIRC, thirty-three days of Hell and it turns out the accuracy of DNA identification is several whole orders of magnitude less accurate than has previously been sworn to in court. Our legal system is about to be logjammed for years as appeals start hitting it.
I can honestly state that no prosecutor is going to let me a juror on any case involving DNA.
That releasing a report likely to bring them to public intention happens on same day they announce "new and improved, buy one get one free, one time only offer. " service.
Or perhaps the first cup of tea of the morning has failed to quell the deep dark cynicism of my soul into temporary abeyance.
Interesting, as aside from privacy issues, I wonder at the general value of dna testing initiated by the subject for the purpose of disease susceptibility.
In rare occasions it could identify possibility of a rare disease. But most genetically transferred issues can probably be spotted by looking at relatives health histories.* [ "your father's got heart disease, your grandfather died of heart disease. Your bp/ecg is fine so my professional advice is exercise in moderation, eat in moderation, drink in moderation and avoid spicy foods"]
* excluding an absence of family histories - can't expect an orphan to know.
There are two easy rebuttals to the idea that you can just look at family histories: recessive genes, and new mutations. I suspect that most people don't realise how common the latter are. E.g. according to the U.S. National Institute of Health,
At least 25 percent of Marfan syndrome cases result from a new mutation in the FBN1 gene. These cases occur in people with no history of the disorder in their family.
"So on at least one occasion the FBI has asked for specific details on an individual. We don't know for a fact it was their DNA tests, but since that is 23andMe's sole function, it's a fair bet."
Honestly, it's not a bet I would take. The FBI approaches many businesses for a variety of information, very little of it directly related to whatever it is the business may do. While it's disturbing that the FBI may be looking for a back-door way to collect genetic information, we simply don't know that's the case here, and it's much more likely the information sought had nothing to do with customer genetics.
When the FBI requests car rental information on a particular individual, for instance, it's a lot more likely they're looking for information related to, say, a truck bombing than building a database on the public's rental car usage.
I don't trust the security or ethics of some random company to have that sort of data on me, knowing that my government would probably like to collect it and file it away with all my text messages and phone calls. I don't know of any negative consequences that could have for me today (unless I murder someone) but what about 10 or 20 years from now?
Not to mention what might happen if they went bankrupt, and a health insurance provider acquired their assets. Even if they have some promises they won't ever pass on the data, I'm sure the lawyers at Wellmark or Cigna would be able to find a way around that. I imagine that if you look at enough genes, almost everyone has multiple risk factors for expensive diseases. Insurance providers would find a way to misuse that knowledge, if they had it!
Doesn't seem worth the risk, just to know what my ancestry is, especially since I have a pretty good idea what it is. I suppose if I really felt I had to know I could have my parents tested, since they are unlikely to live long enough to experience the negative outcomes of DNA data leakage I'm concerned about...
To be honest, I'm less worried about three-letter-agencies having accessto my DNA profiling than I am about the insurance companies. They seem to have forgotten that their purpose is to agregate risk and provide cover for the unfortunate *irrespective of their risk*, rather than attempting to provide cover only for those fortunate enough to be unlikely ever to need it.
Which is not to say, for example, that some forms of insurance are suited to examining individual risk; someone with an expensive car and a long history of accidents and expensive claims might reasonable be thought to be putting an unreasonable claim on the insurance company and either charged at a higher rate to reflect those claims, or simply refused insurance. However, there is a difference between that and medical claims: in the majority of cases, it's hard to see how an individual has any control over his genome.
They seem to have forgotten that their purpose is to agregate risk and provide cover for the unfortunate *irrespective of their risk*, rather than attempting to provide cover only for those fortunate enough to be unlikely ever to need it.
That might well be a worthy social aim and something social security programmes should address, but it's not the purpose of insurance companies - they exist to provide financial compensation to individual customers for known risks, should that risk materialise. The purpose of aggregating many individual risks is to enable the company to bear the cost of individually large, but unlikely, payouts; each risk should in principle be priced as accurately as possible.
The nearer a risk gets to being a certainty rather than a possibility the more expensive it is to cover that risk, and for any sane insurer the price for doing so will increase. A fact that is very obvious to young and inexperienced drivers, for example.
If I need a heart transplant I could wait on the waiting lists until I died or just buy on the black market the name and address of a perfect DNA match and arrange a fatal accident for them. I would of course jump straight to the top of transplant list as the heart is a perfect match for me and unlikely to match anyone else.
I certainly wouldn't put it past some people with money / power thinking this was a good idea and with the typical data security doesn't seem like a big hacking job.
on the minus side, is it not possible it was forced to claim it refused, under some obscure laws, same or similar to those gagging orders?
...
and to keep it on the minus side, another option is that they just lie. It wouldn't be the first time in history of mankind, when a company management lie. Why? Well, because they can get away with it, they think. And then, oopsie, we didn't exactly allow the agencies to snoop, we meant something else when we said we didn't.
...
To keep the tin hat on, there are those rogue engineers too. Happened more than twice in history, you know, Google engineer slurping world data, VW engineers meddling with test results. And in banking, libor and the rest, it was just a couple of rogue traders, right?
"This is going to cause major problems for a lot of European healthcare providers who might use US based or US owned labs for testing batches of samples."
Not necessarily. All they need to do send a sample with just an ID code and keep the patient's details to themselves. Otherwise the ECJ has already caused them major problems.
Rather worryingly, Genomics England are using an American company (Illumina) to sequence the genomes for the 100k genomes project (check the FAQs on Genomics England site).
Supposed to be compliant with local data laws but you never know what kind of data sharing might happen with an international company, especially if they're sharing servers etc.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious (cf Safe Harbour), isn't it about time we had a more robust international legal framework for management of our own data?
Just wait until they have hand held dna scanners (I mean seriously who thinks that there's not a company or research lab NOT working on such tech) then the fun will really begin.
When it becomes part and parcel of every police stop then we're going to have all sorts of issues. Mainly because dna had a terrible habit of getting everywhere from a crime scene (why do you think British scientific units wear such fetching paper outfits?) so how many people are going to be caught up, spied on or locked up because dna became so easy to collect?
But then the government would never let such a thing happen, right?
Watch the true crime shows like " forensic files". Some will scare you to death. There was a cold murder case that occurred before DNA and there was still enough tissue around to get a match. They had two hits, one would have been a ten year old boy at the time of the murder and another was a guy who would have been old enough to have committed the murder. He was convicted solely on the DNA evidence.
The cop said that when the guy was told they DNA match on him to the murder " he didn't act innocent. Whatever that means.
There *will* be a point in the reasonably near future where I will have to run the DNA testing thing. There is one child in our house who's parentage is possibly questionable. It is not an issue in the relationship sense, or in how we deal with one another, but, me being a responsible parent, I will want to be able to grant that child sufficient concrete medical history that they can make responsible medical and parenting decisions of their own.
I would be utterly horrified to consider that a TLA could pull either of our DNA data or personal information out of that testing agency with so little as a formal information request. I would hope that there is a clearly defined legal predicate to the release of such information at all, never mind any chance of them 'just asking for it'.
And to moiety's issue, I would be poking at getting that set of laws changed. It might take years or thousands of bodies, but I would be working on it in small steps constantly - that capability for abuse needs to be ripped out of a system meant to save lives, keep people safe, and solve crimes. Legal enforcement is no place for dominance, vengeance or ego, and that is what moeity's description implies happened there. And if you ask any number of psychology folks they will note that many rapes are based on anger/dominance/ego, not sex. The allegory may seem to diminish a rape victim's experience, but perhaps if we all were offended by the systemic abuse of humans, either in the abuse of the term "reasonable" where used in law, by the subtle, little niggling differences in the way persons of one colour treated persons of another colour, or by the judgemental attitudes that are jammed into our culture by the media about body shape, or by the culture of fear that we are being beaten into on a daily basis by our supposed politcal leaders - in the same way we as a species claim to be offended by the concept of "rape",
MAYBE we could change a lot more things around the world.
<okay - that ran off the track a bit - but basically - I'm horrified that a DNA testing private company even has to publish that sort of crap at all, but actually happy that they DO. Lets just hope they *are* being honest about it>
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