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A comment on Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a major genealogy database. Parent comment

Re:Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a ma... by beowulfey on Thursday July 23, 2020 @04:59AM (#23925486)
To your first point, you can go out to the street and bring home someone’s random dna, but there is no way you’d ever be able to know who’s dna it was.

... unless you were to look it up maybe, in this leaked dna database.

Dna is not inherently an identifier. It needs the lookup code in order to act as one. A database like this MAKES it no longer a secret.

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Re:Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a ma... by runaway on Thursday July 23, 2020 @05:04AM (#23925501)
I'm not talking about taking random samples off a sidewalk. I'm saying if you follow a person you know and collect something they've discarded, now they're in the database. Do that enough times and everyone's in it. That's the exact technique the police use to collect people's DNA without their consent.
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