Most of us will really not like it if it is unclear who will get access to information that is not intended for outsiders and is password protected: photos, personal correspondence with a discussion of mutual acquaintances and all sorts of innocent nonsense that no one except close friends needs to know about.
If you are concerned about the safety of your personal space at least at this level, then compared to the threats that await us in the near future, this is all the perfect kindergarten. Your DNA can turn out to be such a breach in the personal data security system that it could not even be dreamed of in a nightmare.
It's no secret that personal genetic information today is of great interest for science, especially for biomedicine. The individual human genome has a major impact on how the body responds to treatment. In a very few years, doctors will begin to use genetic information to treat patients.
With the spread of genetic medicine, naturally, more and more people will resort to genetic tests, therefore, more and more genetic information will accumulate in a certain database. As a result, personal information can be at risk, because any database, as we know, can be hacked.
What kind of information could this be that your genome will reveal to an attacker? Not much so far, but the situation is changing rapidly. In the near future, the person who has your genome will be able to determine your nationality, skin color, tendency to be overweight, addiction to alcohol, whether you suffer from diseases such as bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, the likelihood of cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. not to mention finding out who your real father is.
How quickly this kind of information can be obtained has become clear thanks to an experiment by a group of MIT students led by Janiv Ehrlich. Using information in the public domain, students were able to figure out anonymous volunteers who donated their genetic data for the sake of science. The most unpleasant thing is that the information that helped the students in their search was, as a rule, posted online not even by the volunteers themselves, but by their distant relatives.
These distant relatives, in our case all men, were users of genealogy websites. They put their Y chromosome data into a database called Ysearch, which contains the names and data on the Y chromosomes of people. And since both surnames and Y-chromosomes are passed from fathers, the Ysearch database can be used as a kind of dictionary that translates Y-chromosome data into surnames, and even those people whose data is not in this database. Enter someone's Y chromosome data and you get the most likely owner's last name.
This is exactly what the researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did with the genetic information of anonymous volunteers that fell into their hands. After getting the names that supposedly belonged to the volunteers, the students went into other databases like PeopleFinder.com and finally identified the people. Five out of ten were completely "declassified".
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The lower the cost of genetic tests, the easier it will be to access this information. While the threats associated with theft of genetic data exist only in theory, but now it is worth considering how to protect yourself in the future.
The lesson we can learn from the University of Massachusetts experiment is that each of us - patients in hospitals, research institutes, and clinics offering genetic testing - should be as careful about storing our genetic information as we are about storing our personal and financial information.
In the near future, thanks to genetic information, it will be possible to find out much more interesting things about you than thanks to compromising photos from a corporate party that you diligently protect with a password.