Here’s a bigger thought. Imagine a world where serial killers get caught a lot earlier before killing scores of people. The government is not the only enemy.
What I'm more worried about is insurance companies using this info to say you are part of a cohort expressing allele group X% and is thus more likely to Y, and then acting accordingly based on that info. What if in the future your grandchild gets told they express an allele that gives them a propensity to alcoholism, and on those grounds is barred from entering certain establishments without losing coverage, or without permission? It sounds outlandish, but it's not when you consider in some of our lives, we were born able to buy alcohol at any age, then 16, then 18, then 21. Recently in the past 5 years I've heard more than one conversation about possibly revisiting this to include smoking at age 21, and limiting the size of sugar drinks in a single purchase.
I don't consume sugar or alcohol, but it's also not my choice to say what you should do, especially not because of your genetics, yet if I were an insurance company we sign a contract that gives me that right, so why enable it?
> Think bigger: just being an enemy of an unfriendly state, potentially in your own country 25 years hence, who knows?
I don’t understand the logic of the supposed threat you’re talking about: if you’re so worried about some future dystopian authority that throws its ‘enemies’ into prison without them committing any crime, why would they need a relative’s long-ago stored DNA to do it?
Sure they can make evidence up, but the logic is that even authoritarian regimes need an inner circle of honest supporters. Think CCP or USSR, they do honestly believe in what they do was right.
The ancestry databases (at least, the ones I'm aware of) contain SNPs and not full genomic sequences. Even if "targeted assassination virus" was a real thing, it would almost certainly need more data.
Seems like a lot of work when a bullet or dioxin is much cheaper. In any case, if they really wanted to off someone with a targeted genetic attack, surely they could just swipe their DNA from a door handle, or a piece of mail, or a piece of trash carelessly thrown out, or from their sewage line, or a million different ways.
