I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/

Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point:

both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia")

You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'.

A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information.

Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.

> IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information

How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?

Indeed. It’s essentially the age-old conundrum: I don’t need to worry about my privacy because I’m not breaking the rules… until someone changes the rules.

When I was a kid, I recall police coming to our classrooms to fingerprint us. The whole school got fingerprinted. The idea was to help police if kids went missing.

Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.

How close does a DNA "match" have to be to get somebody tossed in jail? Do they actually require 100%, or is a "match" something less? What's the false-positive rate? Would a non-twin sibling's DNA "match"?

Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.

Perfect enforcement of crimes is a bad thing. If criminal law was perfectly enforced we'd still be in Prohibition and PGP would also be illegal.

Totally agree; we can't leverage good stuff because we are mess.

There are some sorts of protocols and conventions that might help with this.

For example, not-for profit medical systems can hold certain records , then problems are regionally isolated and have extra layers of protection.

Biosignatures, similarly, we may want to only enabling 'matching, and with a warrant' - so that gov may not procure individuals biometrics, but only require a 3rd party lab to do matching, with oversight, process etc.

That would radically limit concentration of of actual power, likelhihood of problems.

If biometric matching companies were liable for failure to implement protocol (aka delete after test) etc - then that's powerful.

Regulations are never perfect, but they work.

Companies can skirt the law - but 99% of the time it's just normal compliance.

The trick is to make regs that don't encourage breaking compliance, and when it happens, the blast radius is limited.

New Jersey "government-ize-ed" this quite a while with a database that's quite abused. But every US hospital does genetics testing for allergies (a few for milk and similar that are nearly a death sentence for the new born).

NJ is just ahead of giving law enforcement access whenever it wants for searches, and renting the data to whoever pays.

That's the issue with granting the government more surveillance powers, you can never trust it will only be used 'properly' and more and more in the US the Supreme Court is tearing down the minor safeguards of independent agencies so more and more it's up to the whims of the current President.

On the downside, millions wrongly killed, imprisoned, fined, families torn apart.

On the upside, think how good that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA article will be.

Life in general would be a lot simpler and nicer in a perfect world with perfect (whatever it means) people in it

ZK, FHE, MPC is written in Rust/Swift/C(pp) to support proper DNA data management. I assume that there is already done research related to DNA. Any modern phone has enough to crank needed bits. These schemes do not need trust to company nor government.

Remaining is to upgrade old phones of every body.

Your argument boils down to "if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we could do this", so I'm not sure what the point of it is.

(Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.)

At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.

The movie Gattaca deals with this theme and it has a good plot too!

Why has to be the government if anything could be done by health providers and be guarded by the existing privacy laws that don’t allow the government to indiscriminately access it

As someone who loves Gattaca, no thanks !

You've unwittingly demonstrated why it's impossible to have a "trusted government", and why governments are inherently awful even without nefarious motives!

> "we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before"

You've casually thrown out a use that sounds like it would be valuable, and thus has political appeal - but it actually fails hard to false positives. If you're merely confirming a DNA match, then the small chance of a false positive remains small - you're only comparing against one candidate. But if you do a population-wide search, then that chance of finding false positive multiplies [0] across the whole population! So even with good intentions, you've invented a process that picks random people out of society and harasses them (at best, with the way justice systems actually work this would lead to false convictions).

A historical reminder: the Nazis were highly effective at persecuting Jews in the Netherlands precisely because of the country's meticulous population registry.

You never know who will be in power tomorrow. The convenience of a centralized system today does not outweigh the catastrophic danger of that system in the wrong hands in the future. Specially nowadays.

There are several European countries that do this from what I understand

I live next to a reservation and feel that there is a lot in common between the US indian reservation system and concentration camps.

My position is that the US has been on this road for about 250 years. Blood quantum and similar policy choices forced on people, individually and in groups, have been very damaging.

I’m fine with collecting DNA from foreign CRIMINALS and no amount of hand-wringing is going make me sympathize for them when we have tens of millions of people here illegally.

Maybe they'll discover the illegal-immigrant gene or the unwanted-wrongthinker gene.

They don't mention this, but one major reason for apartheid's Bantustan policy was to recognize distinct homelands and preserve cultural communities. This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other than nebulous claims. Yes, assigning people to ethnic homelands is like any other government record-keeping, which is routinely done, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of separate national identities, which was at the heart of many apartheid concerns.

Look at this guy making excuses for the Nazis