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| John Tenniel's cartoon "New Crowns For Old Ones!" showing Disraeli and Queen Victoria. |
Let me use this space to beg forgiveness from my descendants, in case they ever care, for submitting my DNA to two corporations. I think the insights into my evolutionary and genealogical past and genetic present are worth the exchange but perhaps it will prove in the long run that I handed over too much.
Even if Helix and Ancestry.com do not misuse my genetic data, could their successor companies exploit their genetic databases? What secrets about the human condition will be gleaned from the amassing of millions of genomes?
How will law enforcement use all these genomes? Right now there are no real limits to police use of genetic genealogy. Most people of European descent in the United States are already identifiable, through DNA uploaded by distant relations to public databases.
UC Davis law professor Elizabeth Joh writes in her New York Times op-ed:
If the police are to be given unlimited access to the genetic information of your entire family tree, they should have it at the end of a public debate, not by default.I am disinclined to consent to law enforcement accessing my DNA since there is no guarantee that every user is going to be Law and Order's Olivia Benson cracking cold cases. Being of Latin American descent, I am also unsure of who could be targeted using my DNA. ICE unveiled a plan to administer 100,000 DNA tests to migrants who have crossed the US-Mexican border, with no mention of how the results will be used and stored.
Ancestry.com moved its entire infrastructure over to Amazon Web Services. The Department of Homeland Security also moved its entire biometric database to Amazon Web Services. What will Amazon do with this genetic information, as well as the data from my wife's steady stream of online purchases?
What are Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter also doing with the steady stream of data I have left behind? I work for a company that analyzes public social media posts for breaking news, security incidents, and other informational awareness. But what are the macro-lessons about humanity that companies and governments are learning from billions of internet posts?
Yuval Noah Harari tackles these lines of thinking in his book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," and he finds humanity is losing control:
"At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset — their personal data — in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists for colorful beads and cheap trinkets." (p.79)
"We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximize the human potential. Indeed, we have no idea what our full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind." (p.71)
Data-cows. That is quite an image. Harari sees real danger in this complacency:
"We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability to try to sell us something — be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use these inner leverages against us. [...] While science fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking." (pp.70-71)
Harari leaves us with this interesting question — who should be in charge of our data:
Does the data about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut [at] gmail.com
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