Safety or invasion of privacy.

I wonder if people realise that a company who provide your ancestry when you send them a DNA sample are sharing their records with the FBI in the US? What America does today....
As far as young women and men getting drunk and getting home there is an organisation called Street Pastors who actively help look after such people. One of the things I was told and thought quite shocking was the fact that some taxi drivers will not pick up these people because they are often sick in their cab. So if someone rings their family they may have already tried other methods of getting home and be desperate

Yes, a friend of mine is a Street Pastor.

I didn't realise about the sharing of the DNA results with the FBI

It would be extremely rare for that to happen FarNorth and other evidence could disprove that anyway.

Im really quite annoyed that both sets of my childrens GPs have gone and done unsecure dodgy commercial ancestry DNA testing without any discussion or consideration about how that could potentially impact my children's privacy and safety in the future. They say it is "their choice" but they are not the ones who will be living with the consequences.

My kids now have no choice, their family DNA (combined with the family trees their GPs have published online with their names on it) is going to the highest bidder and who knows how it will be used in future!

In past wars people have escaped persecution by hiding their ancestry/changing names etc. DHs own family did so a couple of generations back you would think they would know better than to take away DDs option to ever hide their background in the future!

notanan it would be advisable to make their family tree private, if they will.
Usually the names of anyone living is not shown - but easy to find out.

We're all assuming that the DNA records & matching would be infallible.
It's just possible there could be errors while everyone shouts "You are guilty. DNA says so!"

This is apparently an argument against jury trials as tv has led people to believe that forensics = proof, rather than a tool open to interpretation.

This is also an issue with commercial DNA companies, they can interpret your DNA to make it suit the buyer, so say for example they want to profile people who have a "significant likelihood of being jewish" the raw DNA data can be made to fit that brief if they want it to IYKWIM .

If insurance companies are paying then to find "high risk" people who should pay higher premiums, and they have a quota to meet, they will find X amt of high risk people in their raw data by adjusting the parameters to suit themselves

Jalimall once you publish data online it is never really private, regardless of your privacy settings. And you can never permanently delete it either.

See DNA is like statistics

1. It can be poorly obtained in the first place affecting the end result

2. Both offer raw data not "answers". Both need to be analysed to provide usable information. As with stats, we know that people can lie with statistics by making the data appear to prove their point, so they can then use it as justification for their end goal.

Say... an insurer wanted to up premiums for ppl with risk of heart disease. Say (plucking this out of thin air) 40 genes are known to be involved in heart disease.
Say that everyone has at least 20 of them, but in genetics its more to do with combinations rather than individual genes so having just 20 of them actually puts you in the lowest risk group.

But. A dodgy firm may offer to sell your insurer the names they have of their clients who have any genes that contribute to heart disease risk... they can give your name even if you are acutally low risk! See?

Whereas a better interpretation would be anyone with 35-40 of them in the absence of lifestyle factors, or > 25 of them with 2 or more lifestyle factors.

You have only 20 which by themselves makes you as low risk as possible. You dont smoke and are a healthy weight. Your data has been sold and is now being marketed onwards as you being a person with "genes that contibute to heart disease". Your insurer buys it. Your premium goes up.

When you have genetic testing with the NHS your data is kept within the highest security imaginable. There are security measures at every step. Your raw data is kept in a Different geographical location to your identity data and can only be combined with your interpreted data in a 3rd location.

So it is obviously high risk data to be floating about....yet people are giving it away for the "fun" of getting back some poorly interpreted geniology info.....

Sorry Jalima, only just seen your post. The national DNA database is fed by the police from the samples that they take, see www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn258.pdf If Ancestry is selling off data to the US, I am sure GCHQ will get their hands on it!

Since the database is hosted on a gov.uk website, government departments will have access to it. If you apply for a DBS check, you will find that your passport, national insurance and driving licence details are all linked up now in one profile. The only records that aren't are your medical records, but there is a movement to gain access to those. I was warned that the police have been given access to an East Anglian hospital to trawl patient records looking for domestic abuse victims to encourage them to come forward. Bad enough, but if they were tempted to look for drug users etc while they were in there?

I don't trust this Government with much, but at the moment I do trust them not to start profiling people by race or religion. However if the majority of MPs were to be replaced.....

Its also worth noting that with medical genetic testing only data relevant to your diagnosis is taken out and interpreted. If that little sliver of data throws up any "consequential findings" not relevant to your diagnosis there are protocols for that....

But you pay a commercial company to pluck out some ancestry data, you dont have the same safeguards about the rest