is the essence of the privacy concern that data showing predisposition for diseases (or whatever sort of weakness) can be dystopia-used to discriminate (insurance, etc)? Or just privacy in general?

How about creating a virus to give a disease to everyone of a specific race

Assuming that technology even exists, you wouldn't need 23andMe to get the relevant genetic data.

you'd have to define "race" but the idea seems legit considering crispr-cas9

That's science fiction. No matter what you read in the popular press or scientific journals, engineering a virus specific enough to perfectly target a group of people sharing a common genetic history with perfect specificity and sensitivity, is still not something we could do. I also don't see this as being technically possible for some time.

I keep re-reading what you wrote, and I think it's less far fetched than you imply, for the following reasons.

Huge datasets labelled as to ancestry exist, characterizing distributions of alleles that imply "race", which is how Ancestry and 23andme, for American company examples, do some of their analyses.

At least two Nobel prizes were recently awarded, one to Doudna and Charpentier related to Crispr-CAS9 for context-sensitive genome edits, and another for mRNA (which was in development for a decade or so before the entire Covid repurposing arose).

So, I think the part missing, to your point, is the "vector" that would deliver a sequence of patch files, perhaps via CRISPR-cas9 etc, which would perhaps bind to the constellation of race-implication genome sites to collectively build some proteins of whatever sort of interest, whether for fitness repair or fitness reduction in the host.

I said what I said above based on 30+ years of experience in this field. Be aware that the entire field of gene therapy was paused for 20 years because a single patient died in a single study in the 90s.

Race is a proxy variable for genetic history and we have enough genetic history to identify what "race" people belong to, in a computational way, with a great deal of human judgement. Implementing that "logic" in the form of a gene therapy delivered as a virus is much harder. Molecular logic, these days, is fairly simple and doesn't allow us the level of accuracy you would need.

If you don't require 100% sensitivity and specificity the job is "easier". For example, what should your theoretical virus do to people who are children of two parents with very different genetic history? Which "race" do they belong to? And if you go down that path, you're basically going to have to convince your funders (because this would be an extremely expensive research project) that your weapon of mass destruction will likely kill some fraction of allies.

Those are just a couple things off the top of my head; I could write a whole book on how hard delivering gene therapy is.

yep, totally understand and agree it's a super vague notion, with super imprecise possible consequences.

Because I don't care about privacy and I wanted my DNA tested, duh.

I don't understand privacy nuts.

Emotions? We all make those emotional mistakes?

Because I needed to know whether I had genetic health issues. I assume you use a smart phone. If so, you've already given up your privacy. You're like the people that scream about someone having Alexa in their house while simultaneously carrying Siri everywhere in your pocket.

What exactly is someone going to do with my DNA? Any entity that's a threat to use it for something nefarious is going to get it from me pretty easily. They could grab any number of physical items that I've touched or left my hair on etc.

Should they do a better job of protecting the data? Yes. Am I going to freak out over something that will likely not affect my life in any way? Nope.

Privacy nuts are always going overboard about things that mean very little.

Genetic data sounds important but in the bigger scheme of things, it's probably the least manipulatable data about a person on the internet.

My genetic data is less weaponizable than if I uploaded hundreds of pictures of myself and my shared my social graph to Facebook, if I shared my political opinions on Twitter, if I commented/posted on Reddit boards of my interests and hobbies. It's also less weaponizable than the multitude of "invisible" data that I feed to Google, my incompetent local government, service providers, every shop that is shipping something to my home address.

I lose genetic data everywhere I go, every day. 50-100 hairs fall of my head, and I leave fingerprints on everything I touch. I "lose privacy" every day by walking into somebody else's photo/video/TikTok, and by mishandling of it by poor government/business entities.

Life's too short.

Please help me understand what negative consequence I am likely to experience because of this. Not something conceptual like "you don't have privacy!" - be specific.

People of Ashkenazi jewish descent might have a more tangible grasp on the negative downsides of this leak.

So you're saying - someone in the US is going to discover my ancestry and... do what? You can find far more inflammatory things about me online. Besides, if someone really wants to attack Jews, it would be a lot easier to find the address of their local synagogue. Or search the phone book for obvious last names.

There are a lot of lessons to learn from the 20th century, but I don't think "you have to hide your ancestry" is one of them.

Oh yeah - nothing bad has ever happened based on knowledge of a minority group's ancestry...