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#thoughtoftheday — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #thoughtoftheday, aggregated by home.social.

  1. The old #Veritasium video about "How They Caught The Golden State Killer" youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg raises some important points: The genetic information stored in various databases allows identifying distantly related individuals. Most are comfortable with that idea, as long as we're catching a killer or sexual predator. But the legal frameworks that control the law enforcement access to these database are not fixed and the laws governing the access can change. Let's image that our ability to identify certain criminal tendencies from genome gets to the point we can identify potential predators or future killers even before they potentially commit these acts. It might be difficult to argue against employing such capability to pre-emptively stop crime. Going this path is an insanely slippery slope, and unfortunately much of it is out of our control anyway. So many people have already deposited their genetic material to these databases that regardless how you personally feel about it, we're all already in the databases via our relatives. Since the laws will be enacted by politicians voted to the office by the majority, individual objections will carry little weight. To make matters worse this is a highly complicated topic which is easy to twist by using populist catchphrases. I'm no pessimist by any measure but I find this moderately terrifying. #thoughtoftheday #genetics #dnasequencing #profiling #privacy