• gibmiser@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So, paternity tests exist. Genetics, once enough data are collected, can absolutely be used to identify people.

    • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Correct. Much like with a fingerprint, with both examples, you can determine with good accuracy if they are the same.

      In addition, as tools are advancing, we can extrapolate with very large data sets to identify you even without having seen your specific code, by tracing commonalities through any relatives of yours that voluntarily or involuntarily submitted their codes. However, this does still require those codes to be identifiable. A randomized set of random people’s codes could not be used for this, anymore than a database of fingerprints where all the labels were deleted could be used. It’s just a bunch of random fingerprints, with no names attached anywhere at all, its just a bunch of bleh.

      So, big concern in the hands of anyone who has not scrubbed the labels all off, which would overall render it much less useful.