I suppose you could try and see where I've been since I have my sequence publicly stored here https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC
If nothing else, I'll serve as a cautionary tale against this if something happens to me as a result of having my DNA publicly available to all.
What is somewhat amusing to me is that any one who has ever run PCRs for humans or low template DNA knows to do this with the utmost precaution for airborne DNA contamination. 35 to 45 cycles of 2x amplification for paleolithic sample.
If this tech becomes widespread and cheap, what are the privacy implications of being able to sequence human DNA floating in the air in any public or private space? It feels like a classic 'can we/should we' problem.
Even as a big privacy advocate, I don't see much reason to be especially concerned.
The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking.
Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do.
There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could.
It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.
You can clone fingerprint like here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30623611
Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real.
Same for DNA then.
>Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real.
>Same for DNA then.
There's a world of difference between cloning a fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like fluids), and this technology.
The air might carry the particulates to areas never traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints.
Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling to a different city could imply that thousands of people have gone to a city they never went to before. Not happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA.
The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless for court, and more easily game-able than any other biometric by a lot.
To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
This requires action by someone else (who also risks leaving behind evidence).
The airborne stuff just spreads by itself. To far more places, far quicker, all the time.
Not just that. I touch a door knob and shed some skin cells. You touch the door knob and pick up some of my skin cells. You touch another door knob I’ve never seen and leave my DNA there.
There's always that subset of people (Magicians, crooks, hackers, the terminally curious, etc) who will always do the ridiculous thing nobody thinks anybody would bother doing ;)
The danger depends a lot on the details of the technology. You're assuming the results would be noisy enough that they're more or less useless. But what if they're not that noisy? Maybe it's easy to distinguish if a person passed near the filter or >100 meters away based on the intensity of the collected signal? Maybe you can even approximately distinguish the age of the DNA. Suddenly that sounds quite useful for tracking and for use in courts
Noise is not the only thing I mention, it's just one of many reasons. The fact that it is so easily gamed by bad actors is another compelling reason why it wouldn't work in the courts and is a poor tracking technique.
Primarily though, there are more accurate ways of tracking people at this very moment, which are less prone to false positives, less prone to faking, cheaper, more easily scalable, and are already widely used and accepted in courts.
This offers basically no improvement over any existing tracking technology, with a handful of downsides that the others don't suffer from.
While I think it's good to ask these sorts of questions, they need to be asked within the context of what is already happening. If there wasn't cameras everywhere, ubiquitous and accurate phone tracking, internet connected cars, GPS trackers the size of a thumbnail, etc. then yes, this technology would be concerning. But that's not reality.
Privacy advocates are already looked at with a sideways glance. The least we can do is be responsible on when we raise the alarm. This is not one of those times.
>The other techniques you mentioned also suffer from some drawbacks.
Of course, which is why I never implied that they don't have drawbacks. Just that the drawbacks of this method, in the context of privacy and tracking, are much more numerous.
>And I want to reiterate that you don't know how prone this new technology is to false positives, you don't know how cheap it can be made.
I don't know how cheap it will be, that's true (it's probably more expensive, in time and money, than an air tag or pin camera). But it is pretty easy to figure out that this will have more false positives than every other current tracking method. Give me an air filter and 30 minutes to walk through a store, and I can make it look like dozens of people were in places they never were. That's not an issue with any other method, especially considering the effort to produce false positives by a bad actor is ~0.
>Just to illustrate, instead of figuring out how to put concealed cameras in the entries of a building, could it be enough to place a small device near the ventilation exhaust fan?
Even if we ignore the false positives and difference in cost, this wouldn't let you pinpoint timing, any other information about the person that might be valuable (who else was with the person, what they were wearing, etc.), has a risk of contamination, doesn't have the ability to give real-time results, no option of capturing audio... Probably several other downsides I'm not thinking of immediately.
Again, I'm not saying that this technology is completely useless. Just that, compared to all of the technology already invading your privacy, this technology is a large step backwards in practically every privacy-related metric.
Raising a fuss about stuff like this is how ordinary people get fatigued by "privacy nuts" and stop caring about the dozens of technologies and policies which are significantly worse, which are already invading our privacy.
Some countries have very strict rules!
For example in France, doing DNA sequencing without consent of all parties, is crimimal offense with up to one year in prison! Similar in Germany.
Those laws are designed to prevent paternity tests, but can be appplied very broadly!
Photos can be faked.
Yet we still fear face recognition based surveillance.
When the wind blows, a photo doesn't get faked, but these particulates will move to areas you haven't been to.
Faking a photo, convincingly enough to pass forensic scrutiny, requires skill, time, and equipment. Faking the results of this DNA vacuuming requires no skill, significantly less time, and the only equipment is an air filter.
I can go on, but I have a sneaking suspicion you're just trying to be contrarian rather than actually care about privacy.
Surely the police will start mass collection after the technology is commercialized, to solve theoretical crimes. And then claim that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, since you freely decided to leave the house and knowingly start shedding DNA in public.
This is NOT new tech. As old at least as generating sequence from low-copy number and fragment fossil specimens. This “news” is just a tweak and PR piece. Qualeed explains why this is a non-issue for forensics.
Health insurance companies could sequence every random bit of DNA in a given area, and then raise premiums in zip codes with higher than average rates of congenital disease. Of course, that would be totally unethical and illegal, so they’d just buy a set of risk data from a reputable company that worked out their risk scores somehow (how? Who knows? Best not to ask).
Totally impractical too. The entire point if insurance from the company’s point of view is to fine-tune the policy and pick and choose at the level of individuals. How many cigarettes you smoke and your mean blood glucose level way more actionable.
We're already filmed by several cameras any time we're out in public. We're also tracked by our phones, unless we turn them off.
Privacy of what places you visit is already pretty much dead. We're the last generation who lived like that.
I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that it is, and we have to adapt.
Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even.
> Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even.
For anyone wondering how this works: the cellular modem is a separate general-purpose computer that runs code from the manufacturer and the service provider, the only thing needed to allow tracking a phone that's off is circuitry to allow the modem to draw power independent of the rest of the phone.
I’ve had an iPhone receive a call inside a locked steel 50 cal ammo can. No clue how that is possible, but it happened.
I guess the gasket let enough EM through?
Amusingly, crumpled aluminum foil seems to have a better track record.
Find my phone (as a benign example!) doesn’t work very well if you can’t find it if it’s off.
Internet of Smells
The world is wired. Is bathed in wi-fi waves. It is also full of smell.
Eve and Adam meet at a party. Both are good looking, the kind which is so clean that it looks almost puppet like.
When Adam sees Eve and approaches her, Eve is at first welcoming. Her sniffer ring sends her a message. (The sniffer ring is just a ring with a feather moving somehow between a dog tail and a butterfly wing. It is of course connected to the wired/wifi network.)
The message reads: "Adam has a very bad form of cancer. Is not good genetic material to mate with".
As the polite behaviour rules dictate, Eve forwards the notice to Adam, maybe as a visual message, or as a message which appears on his health wristband, then she moves away, looking for other interesting people.
Adam is only mildly concerned. He contacts, privately, his internet+health insurance provider and files a bug request. Then he goes along with the party.
The next scene happens somewhere far, visible from the external conditions (like for example it is day there, while at the party place was night) and from the people in this scene (for example while Adam and Eve might be porcelaine figures, maybe blonds, or maybe japonese, the guys in the new scene are more like indians or pakistani.)
So these are a bunch of Mechanical Turks in a internet cafe like place in India (for example). They receive Adam's bug ticket. We can see one of them, or several doing various stuff on their not so modern computers, but one of them opens on his screen Adam's request.
We can see that the screen has two windows open, one is a REPL Lisp window, the other is a molecular simulation. (This is a hook for a technical audience, important as any hacker movie screenshot.)
On the Lisp REPL there is an error message. The Mechanical Turk fixes it, then runs a molecular simulation. It works.
He then opens a smell convertor. (Variant, he opens "Nozzle", which is just like Google page visually, he searches for a RNA like word, then he hits enter.) Job done.
The third scene is Adam bedroom. He sleeps, not at all concerned, something between a puppet and a child in his bed.
Travelling to a detail in his room, which looks alike the sniffer ring, only that it is a wifi router with a feather. Lights flicker and the feather begins to swosh.
Travelling to the health bracelet of Adam. Shows: "Bug request solved. Status: healty".
The night is quiet and peaceful. The sunrise begins. Adam dreams something nice.
End.
This was a good read.
Surely it should be possible to spoof presence as well. Non-repudiation is not possible with this alone.
Yeah at what point do we look back at this type of tech and say "the researchers surely knew this was going to be used in a bad way" and then blame them for it?
Like, I get it. The argument that "maybe the tech will be used for good" is an easy one to make. But given how tech is being used more and more for bad these days, surely it's harder to make that moral argument to justify this continued research?
Just because you can come up with one or two good reasons for the tech to exist, doesn't mean you get to ignore the overwhelming amount of reasons it shouldn't.
everyone already leaves DNA everywhere, so it doesn’t seem like a step change.
genetic privacy is a good thing but is utterly artificial, we have to create it if we want it.
Flock Safety but for DNA is inevitable.
Exactly my thoughts, but once the cat is out of the bag
..then there is cat DNA left inside the bag?
About the same as being able to sequence dna left on a doorknob
Life is too short. There is a narrow window in life, if any, when you will probably care about this.
As a child, you won't care.
As an elderly person on their way out, you also won't really care.
Years 20 to 30, you probably don't have anything significant to lose.
50-75, you're probably more focused on being setup for comfortable retirement.
That leaves people in their 30s and 40s, midlife crisis era, you probably have other things on your mind. Kids, hobbies, etc.
If life was may two or three times longer, you might care more since the negative consequences of people sucking DNA out of thin air might affect you for a longer duration, but it isn't. You get maybe 75 good years and that's it. Don't worry about it.
So dogs can smell DNA
The Farnsworth Smell-O-Scope was based on this technology;)
This sounds like a fun exercise of signal to noise ratio
We used to call them Hoovers 25 years ago. Just call them that again
[flagged]
I keep my genome on my hard drive – it’s only a few tens of GBs!
Language models are pretty good at looking up and testing SNPs, but even that has low utility for me. Haven’t found a good use case for it yet.
How much did getting your DNA sequenced cost?
I guess nothing will happen to you, but it's a bit like being naked on the internet?
a person is not their DNA
pictures of a person's private bits are more closely linked to their identity (or self-concept) than DNA?
One is alterable, the other isn't ..
Oops should have said raw, uncompiled, bits
I agree DNA isn't that culturally relevant to an identity but that just seems to be due to anti-intellectualism
Separate from the idea that the easier to alter something is, the more it should considered as a healthy part of identity..