I do worry about my data with them, but when I think about the worst-case scenario - you will not get insured (or have high rates) because you have {some genetic condition}.. it seems just as likely that they will simply require my DNA to apply for insurance. (or get my DNA from a blood test within their system, etc.).
The obvious solution is with legislation for transparency and better health care system.
One aspect to this tangle is knowledge asymmetry: One of the traditional justifications for insurers poking around is to guard against an applicant that conceals important factors as a kind of fraud.
But what about the reverse? There's something intuitively unjust about the customer not knowing why they're being charged a higher rate, especially if it means the company believes there's a potential danger (enough that it affects the bottom-line) but conceals it.
So yeah, I think "transparency" is a robust principle to follow here, especially if anyone is arguing market competition is going to curb the worst abuses.
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The analogy I have used in the past is this fear is like thinking that health insurance companies were more likely to buy the old Marlboro Miles database rather than just making detailing your smoking history a required part of the application process.
If these companies have the legal clearance to use DNA data, why would they be satisfied only having secondhand access to that data for a relatively small subset of the population? They'll obviously want that data for everyone.
Yes. Behavioral data is in most cases far more useful to them than DNA. No need to go all the way of using the non-coding SNPs in a genealogical test to infer your coding DNA, to infer your propensity for smoking, when they can just find out if you smoke instead.
It may have been the lower hanging fruit. But they already have all the tools and behavior analysis is no longer the competitive edge. They can ask for your smoking status and deny your claim for fraud later, but (any genetic data on behavior is an update to fraud investigation value and) they can't know your propensity to non-smoker cancers.
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I put a fake name in when I signed up.
Good luck blue cross.
I always wondered why people are so trusting (gullible?) to use their real data
If they have enough DNA and not-so-secret genealogical data, they can derive your real name anyway.
> you will not get insured (or have high rates) because you have {some genetic condition}..
s/insured/hired
Wait until we have DNA detectors wired up to collect the DNA we exhale and rapid sequencers that handle what might be below the limit of detection today.
Maybe that's fifty years down the road, but it's coming.
Gattaca was a prescient premonition, it was just a hundred years ahead of its time.
Either you or me are deeply wrong about how genotypes relate to phenotype.
While some DNA characteristics can be statistically linked with some costly health conditions, the connection to "being a good hire" seems totally imaginary to me, has always been and will always be.
For what it's worth, public posts and comments on internet are probably a much better indicator of whether someone is going to be an obedient employee, and this dystopia is technically doable right now, and certainly many are working on it already.
Yes, I can imagine those dystopias - my point was that I don't imagine my choice to try 23andMe in 2019 is what dooms me - while others are saved by not making that choice.
I kind of understand your point, now my view would be that it should not be a reason not to delete the data from them, in case it actually helps. Otherwise:
1. Why take the chance?
2. Your DNA being out in the wild also impacts the privacy of your relatives (including those you might not know, and those who don't exist yet (a child, a nephew, a niece for instance)), so if not for you, do it for them.
It won't be a guarantee, but it maximizes the chances.
Why take the chance? Because genealogical data is valuable to you, of course. If it isn't, no amount of legal or technical security will make it worth it.
I do think that the health stuff from 23andMe is only marginally better than astrology, that the ethnicity estimates are inferior to what most people can get from good old fashioned genealogy, but that the matching may be useful, if you value knowing who you're related to a lot.
What makes you believe this is coming? What evidence points to this inevitability?