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A comment on How DNA Site 23andMe Outed Parents Who Gave Up Their First Baby. Parent comment

Re:How DNA Site 23andMe Outed Parents Who Gave Up Their Firs... by jes5199 on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @07:55PM (#3984693)
I'm also very happy with 23andMe. It's really quite cheap, it has some cool ancestry visualizations, and it told me about some health risks I should pay attention to.

I think the privacy questions are overblown. I don't particularly feel like I "own" my DNA, anyway - I leave bits of it around everywhere I go, I share the majority of it with all the members of my species and the entirety of it with my family members. It seems like a fundamentally open-source aspect of nature.

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Re:How DNA Site 23andMe Outed Parents Who Gave Up Their Firs... by kennu on Thursday May 17, 2012 @09:45AM (#3986912)
It's still a very different scenario to specifically acquire a single targeted person's DNA which they left lying around, than to collect a massive database of millions of people's DNA that you can use to make all sorts of queries for whatever purpose you wish.

E.g. insurance companies wouldn't go through the trouble of following around their customers to catch their DNA, but they certainly would like to have that database which can predict their future illnesses.

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