Privacy when DNA tests are getting cheaper
"He said........"
I don't remember this story directly, however it's one that my parents like to re-tell from one of my Dad's first trips abroad as part his job with the Irish Defence Forces and their work with the United Nations. It was sometime around the late 70's, early 80's and in those days there wasn't the instant Skype/Whatsapp/iMessage/Viber message to almost any location on the planet. In those days, communication was a little....crude: telephone calls in Ireland to different county cost an extra charge (and did so until the late 90's), and letters from families to relatives on military trips (taking weeks to arrive) was the norm. Satellite calls were also still in their infancy, and in the case of calls to Lebanon for my mother and father, they were interesting Because two-way speech wasn't possible and thus it was the form of 'half-duplex' communications: only one person could speak at a time, in the same way a walkie-talkie operates. However, instead of my mother or father pressing the button to speak....an intermediate person had to listen in on the call and do the switching for them! As you can appreciate, catching up with your partner with detailed, intimate conversation is challenging when you're aware that someone else is actively having to listen in to switch the speaker.....
It's evident that privacy was non-existent in that case. However, it was simpler times and in that era, if people wanted recordings or to listen in on other communication, it was very similar: physically put someone to listen in on the call as the technical capabilities as well as the computing power wasn't there to really be a cause for concern with privacy: unless you were an army child or partner!
Of course, in 2018 (and going forward), we've moved on a long way since then. Everything is largely just data packets on the Internet, computing costs have plummeted, and we all spend extensive time online leaving a constant 'digital exhaust' of where we've been and what we've done. And in this case,
"How looming privacy regulations may strengthen Google and Facebook"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/technology/privacy-regulation-facebook-google.html
Of course, all this may not matter in time and we could be just arguing over peanuts. As the price of full genome scans comes down, what happens when you can upload your DNA online and in doing so, you automatically in essence give visibility into all your relatives?
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/dna-databases-biology-stripped-bare-1.3481790