Geeks for your information

Quote:Increasingly, modern technologies are helping people’s secrets move into the public domain. There are many such examples, from massive leaks of personal data to the online appearance of private (and even intimate) photos and messages.

This post will leave aside the countless dossiers kept on every citizen in the databases of government and commercial structures — let’s naively assume that this data is reliably protected from prying eyes (although we all know it isn’t). We shall also discard the loss of flash drives, hacker attacks, and other similar (and sadly regular) incidents. For now, we’ll consider only user uploads of data on the Internet.

The solution would seem simple — if it’s private, don’t publish it. But people are not fully in control of all of their private data; friends or relatives can also post sensitive information about them, sometimes without their consent.

Public genes

The information that goes public might be close to the bone, quite literally. For example, your DNA might appear online without your knowledge. Online services based on genes and genealogy, such as 23andMe, Ancestry.com, GEDmatch, and MyHeritage, have been gaining in popularity of late (incidentally, MyHeritage suffered a leak quite recently, but that’s a topic for a separate post). Users voluntarily hand over a biomaterial sample to these services (saliva or a smear from the inside of the cheek), on which basis their genetic profile is determined in the lab. This can be used, for example, to trace a person’s ancestry or establish genetic predisposition to certain diseases.