Maybe a naive question, but Is there a service like 23 and me but that doesn’t collect/keep my genetic information ? @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
What are the potential downsides of the government having your DNA? I don’t think I can think of any for real
I mean other than getting in the fingerprint registry if you’re trying to commit a crime I guess
Copy pasting my other comment
One day some insurance company will decide to pull out your protections because, turns out, you have X% chances to get a cancer by your 40. Then all other insurance companies do the same. Then, one of them accepts you, but you gotta pay N% more for the same coverage
Both of the responses to your comment are batshit lol.
I don’t like the idea of the government having my dna, but does anyone have a genuine (non irrational) reason it would be bad?
The US alone has a rich history of repression (Wikipedia even has a sub-subcategory specifically for ethnic cleansing) and it’s common knowledge those DNA databases have been used by US police to track people down so it’s really not difficult to link those two concepts. These are concrete examples of things the US government does or has done, not some hypothetical scenario.
And that’s all assuming the data is only accessible to governments that have to pretend to care about their citizens, not the for-profit companies and malicious actors that currently do have access to that data.
You’re absolutely right, I can’t think of a single point in history where there was mass persecution of any particular group by a government which might have been far more efficient of they had a handy database of every citizens DNA. Just never happens, not once in all of history. There’s definitely no shining example less than a century ago.
