Oh come on, don't straw man the actual issues. Nobody is worried about GSK getting rich, but are worried about actual issues like insurance discrimination, loss of privacy, loss of control, etc.

I think few people would argue against the benefits of genetic testing, but just because it's a great thing doesn't mean that being complacent around adjacent shady business transactions is the right approach.

You can be for it, but also for privacy, protection against insurance discrimination, etc. at the same time.

If I cared about privacy I wouldn’t have had 23andme and the Personal Genome Project do my genotyping. While it may affect me negatively in the future, the net positive (in aggregate with all participants) will exceed that negative value.

I’m dead in the long run regardless, and would rather find every way I can be impactful with the time I have left, even in these small ways.

Have you considered the impact on your relatives and descendants? They may care more about their privacy than you care about yours, and when you get sequenced they don't have a choice.

I have considered the ethical issues. Not my problem, it’s my DNA.

The problem is, it's also theirs. Using the insurance example, even if you live in a country with socialized healthcare someone down or across the line from you may not. Indeed, you would be putting them at risk for all of the bad things to do with DNA that will be or were invented from fifty years ago until the computers forget your genome, without their consent, and unless they received a copy of your results without their benefit!

It’s a legitimate concern that requires constant vigilance of an educated and engaged electorate. Otherwise we’ll end up paralyzed with anxiety of what if vs progress.

The two things should not be mutually exclusive (privacy and technological advancement). Why do you lay over and just accept that it has to be that way?

Because I don’t feel my genome data needs to be private, or that there is value in keeping it private.

Insurance discrimination is explicitly prohibited by law, and your genetic makeup is about the least private and controllable thing about you since you leave bits of it everywhere you go whether you want to or not.

Insurance discrimination is explicitly prohibited by law, >>TODAY<<

Except it happens all the time.

Another way they could abuse this would be to find some loosely genetic-based "treatment" that just so happens to require expensive DNA tests. I'm sure it's more profitable to use the universal fear of cancer to sell tests than it is to actually attack cancerous cells directly.

Plenty of other risks. Once you get into the X million+ sample ranges false positives for paternity tests or criminal cases become likely.

10 million tests vs 10 million person database means 1 in 10 trillion false positives happen 10 times.

That's not how it works, the chances of two people matching as identical (on the SNP tested by 23andme) by random is astronomically low - orders of magnitude higher than the total number of humans who've ever lived.

Generally at a 7cM overlap you have 50:50 chance whether you're related to that person or not. Anything over say 150cM you're virtually certain to be related (ignoring endogamous populations). At 3,400cM (full-match) it's not even worth considering randomness.

You’re assuming a lot with those statistics.

Paternity tests involve random ~50% of your dna. Sperm samples are generally contaminated and thus less clear cut. But, people’s relatives have been used in the past for these tests dropping the bar even further.

However, being related genetically is not enough. Some people have twin siblings they don’t know about pointing out being related is not nessisarily mean you know anything about the other person allowing for false positives even at 3,400cM.

Unlikely sure, but harm comes in many forms. Saying I can’t think of anything is a long way from saying it’s safe.

Those aren't false positives in that they represent real genetic relationships (i.e they're identical by descent), as the database size increases you don't increase the false positive rate in any meaningful sense at higher match levels.

If you've got a identical twin then you're right that their child will be genetically indistinguishable from your child. But that's down to the nature of genetics rather than anything to do with the reliability of testing or database size.

False positives don't necessarily mean the test was executed incorrectly. It often means you are testing for something closely related to the information you want.

If a test failed because _ then it failed independent of why it failed. If your long lost twin causes you to be involved with a paternity suit or homicide investigation then that's both a false positive and a significant problem.

Why couldn't you run those tests several times?

These are not false positives, because you ran the test wrong.

Suppose a male with red hair, green eyes, and AB+ blood actually has those traits they are just not enough to unlikely identify someone. Adding more genetic traits on it's own is not enough for example you have identical twin or even triplet separated at birth. The core issue is DNA marks are not independent though people often assume they are.

Society will have to adapt to a better understanding that this is true. Keeping one’s DNA secret is not going to be a useful defense against ignorance of how DNA works.

Worked for the last 10,000+ years and still works today.

Sure, at some point in the future it might get fixed or always fail, but until then you need to deal with today not some mythical perfect future.

The last 10,000+ years has not been static from my perspective. Blood testing came along. Limited DNA testing came along after that. Perfect DNA testing will be here soon. The technology won't care how you feel about it being used. I'm not imagining a mythical perfect future. I'm imagining a very real future that we can't avoid and need to deal with more pragmatically.

Plus the negative effects need to be mitigated by legislation (and to a great extent already are) rather than secrecy.