Between your computer and your DNA, huge privacy issues loom aright around the corner according to Clay Shirky:
- Databases have two key weaknesses that affect this debate. The first is that they deal badly with ambiguity, and generally have to issue a unique number, sometimes called a primary key, to every entity they store information on. The US Social Security number is a primary key that points to you, the 6-letter Passenger Name Record is a primary key that points to a particular airline booking, and so on. This leads to the second weakness: since each database maintains its own set of primary keys, creating interoperability between different databases is difficult and expensive, and generally requires significant advance coordination.
Privacy advocates have relied on these weaknesses in creating legal encumbrances to issuing and sharing primary keys. They believe, rightly, that widely shared primary keys pose a danger to privacy. (The recent case of Princeton using its high school applicants' Social Security numbers to log in to the Yale admittance database highlights these dangers.) The current worst-case scenario is a single universal database in which all records — federal, state, and local, public and private — would be unified with a single set of primary keys.
New technology brings new challenges however, and in the database world the new challenge is not a single unified database, but rather decentralized interoperability, interoperability brought about by a single universally used ID. The ID is DNA. The interoperability comes from the curious and unique advantages DNA has as a primary key. And the effect will put privacy advocates in a position analogous to that of the RIAA, forcing them to switch from fighting the creation of a single central database to fighting a decentralized and interoperable system of peer-to-peer information storage.
DNA Markers
While much of the privacy debate around DNA focuses on the ethics of predicting mental and physical fitness for job categories and insurance premiums, this is too narrow and too long-range a view. We don't even know yet how many genes there are in the human genome, so our ability to make really sophisticated medical predictions based on a person's genome is still some way off. However, long before that day arrives, DNA will provide a cheap way to link a database record with a particular person, in a way that is much harder to change or forge than anything we've ever seen.
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