It turns out that your DNA sample can be sold to third-parties and exploited by insurance providers. After the arrest of the alleged “Golden…
It turns out that your DNA sample can be sold to third-parties and exploited by insurance providers.
After the arrest of the alleged “Golden State Killer” based on his relatives DNA sample that was submitted to a website called GEDmatch, people are wondering how their own DNA is being handled by ancestry companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe. It can vary from company to company, but people have much more to worry about than their DNA being used to track down suspects. In fact, the additional privacy issues that you need to be worried about are similar to what you need to worry about when it comes to your Facebook account: third-parties.
The companies that buy DNA information include pharmaceutical companies that use it during research and development of new drugs. Some companies that are known to buy genome information are Pfizer and Genentech.
Officials tracked down Joseph James DeAngelo using a relative’s DNA sample in a genealogical website database. https://t.co/BGiNckqaYN
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) April 27,2018
But worst of all, in some cases it’s impossible to know where your information is being sold. Joel Winston, a consumer protection lawyer, elaborated.
“[The ancestry companies are] handing over your information to someone else and when they do they’re disclaiming responsibility for it and you could never find out who those third parties are.”
Other third-parties can include insurance providers and the military because the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act is full of loopholes. So even the law that’s supposed to protect people from discrimination based on their DNA, is not effective.
Another probable third-party can also be hackers, as experts warn your genetic information is not bound by HIPAA medical information privacy laws and can be stored in vulnerable databases.
There are many striking resemblances between the handling of sensitive data by ancestry companies and Facebook. Laws are not taking into account the sophisticated nature of new technologies, leaving consumers vulnerable.
