This is kinda like saying that because our bodies constantly emit electromagnetic radiation that could be used to construct a detailed nude image, using a camera with the tools needed to do such isn't invasive.
What happens when we have the technology to read internal monologues? What happens when the police are able to hear the lawyer talking to their client because they are talking too loud for the new technology... if they didn't want to be heard should they whisper... and what happens when even that is too loud? Under this reasoning, most all privacy is as good as dead and we are just waiting for the technology to get here.
> Under this reasoning, most all privacy is as good as dead and we are just waiting for the technology to get here.
Because it is! Thank you, somebody finally noticed. You can't preserve privacy and push technology forward, it's either-or. The best we can hope for is, if we chose to continue on the path of progress, that we'll establish social customs around expected privacy, that will amount mostly to "gentlemen turn around and do not look when a lady is undressing in a shared room" and to the privacy of correspondence ("we obviously can read your mail, but it's a common courtesy that we don't"). But you can't stop the fact that we're all radiating information to the world. And there's nothing invasive in collecting it - you don't have to touch me, you just have to stand within my light cone and take a look around.
There is, but I don't believe it balances out, not in the slightest. You can obstruct a channel, but I can use others to reconstruct it. Everything you do leaves casual traces within your lightcone - be it low-level like your reflection in the shop window, or high-level like behaviour of your spouse being influenced by his knowledge about your plans, which can help reconstruct them even if you lie about them. It's like with error correction - you can try and damage the information, but we're figuring out more and more ways in which to recreate it.
At some point, to protect privacy, you'll have to expend a lot of computing power on lying about everything to everyone around you - which is not exactly a way to live or run a society.
I strictly compartmentalize. You could call it lying, I suppose. But it's mostly just not sharing anything between compartments. There's nothing complicated for me to remember.
When it comes to DNA we are already nude. You will have better luck keeping your face private and going about a normal life than hiding your genome from the world. The former can be accomplished with a mask. The latter requires living in a plastic bubble and never sharing the genomic information of anyone.
I do not want to live in a world where everyone must be masked, and although the utility of sharing information about DNA is of a different kind I will also be profoundly sad if we are too afraid of the bogeyman to let other people know what we are made of.
Perhaps I feel so strongly about this because there is literally not one case where DNA information alone has resulted in harm. I challenge you to provide an example. Digitized DNA sequence information from tens of millions of people is floating around in the world. If this were as dangerous as some people make it out to be I would expect there to have been many problems already.
(The example that I have heard is when someone learns their biological parents are not who they think they are. Although this may be troubling I find it absurd that someone should have the right to delude or be deluded about their genetic background. At worst it can pose a dangerous liability as someone lacks information about diseases that may affect them or their offspring.)
Unfortunately you are mistaken. The problem here is not the sharing of DNA information, but the incredibly poor resolution of the standard tests that are used in forensics.
> Two seemingly unrelated individuals—one white and one black—shared the same two markers at nine of the 13 places in the standard DNA profile.
Forensic standards of identity are based on a few _hundred_ base pairs of the three billion in each of our genomes. It is scientifically dishonest to represent this as a conclusive test of identity. The markers are not distributed randomly and large numbers of false positive matches against microsattelite databases are the norm.
If the full genome sequence of an individual were the standard of truth this would not be an issue. It would resolve the problem of mistaken DNA identity entirely! This is the problem the EFF should seek to solve.
>The problem here is not the sharing of DNA information, but the incredibly poor resolution of the standard tests that are used in forensics.
This seems like a goal post shift from 'DNA information alone cannot cause harm' to 'sharing of DNA information alone cannot cause harm', with the alone excluding all uses of DNA information. To me would be like arguing that giving everyone a nuclear bomb is not harmful, it is their use of the nuclear bomb that will cause harm. Or to generalize further, the harm is always the fault of the last event in a chain of events, and all events leading up to it cannot be blamed.
To make another extreme comparison, violations of the 4th amendment related to searches aren't harmful, it is only the (mis)use of that information that is harmful. That isn't an argument I'm buying.
DNA analysis is a tool that has a lot of failure cases that aren't properly understood by many. Keeping peoples' DNA out of databases is a good baseline defense until there is enough understanding and transparency to make sure it is used properly.
I'm not trying to hide it from the world. I'm just trying to keep it out of government databases, where it could be used to bother me over a crime I had nothing to do with.
How could that happen? If they have your DNA and find it at a crime scene and correctly identify you, wouldn't it mean that you were at the crime scene at some point? Perhaps at least you should be contacted to find out what you know. Perhaps for some reason your DNA is there and you have no alibi. This is not just a risk of DNA though: It would be the same effect if a witness saw you but did not see the actual criminal. It will be extremely difficult to categorically avoid this kind of mistake and keeping your DNA out of the public is not going to help.
Are you worried that the test will fail and generate false positives? That is a different issue from sharing your DNA with the government, and one that must be addressed.
The latter. Partial matches are one concern (where someone comes and asks you questions because they think one of your relatives that you've never met may have committed a crime), but laboratory errors and general investigational misconduct are the big one (e.g. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dna-testing-foolproof/ from 2003, or a Brandon Mayfield like situation with DNA instead of fingerprints).
People can see and directly compare fingerprints, but DNA only showes up after extensive tests which gives it much stronger constitutional protections. Further it's only relevant in significant quantities as individual cells may end up hundreds of miles from where an individual has ever been.
Where you at the scene of the crime, or did you happen to walk by the factory where the shelf was manufactured?
PS: As we get better at testing DNA we ar e finding it less relevant.
What happens when we have the technology to read internal monologues? What happens when the police are able to hear the lawyer talking to their client because they are talking too loud for the new technology... if they didn't want to be heard should they whisper... and what happens when even that is too loud? Under this reasoning, most all privacy is as good as dead and we are just waiting for the technology to get here.