If anything, I'd expect people to have more concern about the fact that the police in California are allowed to steal your stuff and grab DNA off of it than the risks from them being allowed to submit your DNA to a privately-owned database full of voluntary DNA submissions.
First off, if you discard something in the trash you no longer are laying a claim to it and giving it up for the trash handlers.
Secondly, it was established in California v. Greenwood that you don't have a privacy right to trash left out on the public curb for pickup; which obviously implies that you don't have a privacy right to trash placed in a public bin.
I dont think thats a good analogy. a better one is your neighbor discarded trash, and your trash is like your neighbors.
I personally think privacy laws need to be set up right away. I think it should be illegal, even in cases of national security, to infer something from your DNA from others, such as relatives without the use of a warrant.
you should not end up in what is effectively a police line up just because your brother submitted his dna to the public domain. people should not be able to use information about his dna, in any way imaginable to infer anything about you.
Why? That seems like a broad restriction that we don't apply to other things like "Your fingerprints partially match some prints at a crime scene" or "You drive the same car as a suspect." People can and do end up in a police lineup for being the same gender and living in the same apartment complex as a perpetrator; I think that's reasonable, because a lineup isn't a conviction.
There's a world of difference between evidence submittable at a trial and evidence making someone worthy of suspicion and further investigation. I agree the bar on the former should be high; the bar on the latter being low on average leads to faster perpetrator identification and a safer community.
our DNA is private. they should not be able to look at it without a warrant even if someone else slimier to you recklessly throws it in the public domain.
Imagine I could read your mind by reading someone else mind. are you ok with me having access to your private thoughts just because someone gave me access to their mind?
> Imagine I could read your mind by reading someone else mind. are you ok with me having access to your private thoughts just because someone gave me access to their mind?
Even if you and I were parent and child, I don't think there's a reasonable philosophy of ownership on which you could hinge the notion that I can't donate the DNA in my cells to a cause because the pattern of half of the (physically completely independent) DNA in your body has a relationship to my own.
I do think you're touching upon possibly an interesting wrinkle in the way our current philosophy of ownership treats data about groups vs. data about an individual. Similar lines of thought underpin the question of whether your friends are culpable for sending data about themselves to Cambridge Analytica if it allows CA to extrapolate information about you.
However, I currently know of no philosophy of ownership that makes the described scenario bad apart from the general "it's a dick move if you do it on purpose to screw someone else over" (but that hinges on the general category of "Don't screw people over on purpose," not on any concept of joint ownership of data).
To pull another analogy: imagine I had dated a rapist and although I didn't have enough evidence to get him convicted of a crime, I told all my friends he was dangerous and now they won't date him. Is this bad? Quite the opposite; it's the system that is already of necessity in place to protect people from bad actors that the legal system fails to handle.
It's the essence of who you are, your uniqueness against every other living thing on the planet.
I can see how psychologically compelling that idea is, even though I disagree.
What I mean is: should I be able to stop my identical twin from uploading his DNA to a genealogy site without my consent because we have identical DNA?
Legally, the answer is pretty much "no" right now, and I think it's morally also "no."
I agree that the use of a public genealogy database is problematic but the way in which the police obtained the genetic material is not.
Once a person discards any material as trash in a public space, it's fair game. The police didn't begin doing this sort of thing when DNA tests were invented.
