[ExI] 23andME - Company issues: privacy

[spike]

>...23andMe has just started selling in Canada this month, including the
health reports, available to Canadians only...

How do they know if a client is Canadian?  I have a college buddy who has
dual citizenship.

>...(While it is outside their jurisdiction I suspect this will annoy the
FDA). ;)

Good, they richly deserve to be annoyed.

>...The FDA is concerned that the health reports may lead to unnecessary
medical interventions. Things like obesity, smoking, high blood pressure,
etc. are much greater risk factors than having a dodgy gene that may or may
not cause a disease in later life...

When they were allowed to do it, 23andMe included genetic risk of obesity
and hypertension.  I don't recall seeing smoking in there; that isn't clear
it has much to do with genetics.

>...From Google's POV the health reports are almost irrelevant. What they
want is to collect as much DNA analysis as possible and do Big Data analysis
on it. If they can use DNA analysis to pinpoint disease causes or ageing
causes then they could get very valuable patents on the cures. This is
Google remember. Your data is used to make them the richest company in the
world.  BillK
_______________________________________________

Hmmm, perhaps.  Better to find the cures and have someone get a patent on it
than not finding it at all, ja?  If a cure is discovered and patented,
better to have it in the hands of the richest company in the world, for they
will be in the best position to develop it, sell it to a government, donate
it into the public domain in exchange for good will, get a bunch of smart
researchers working on it and so forth.  We don't want a poor company
holding the patents for important stuff.

Aside from that, if you do genetic testing, you can download your entire
sequence.  I have mine; it's 30 megabytes of ACGT, which is cool in itself.
In the USA, if you apply for a patent, you must disclose what it is.  So if
someone tries to patent a finding that if a prole has maternal haplogroup
mutation ACCTGGAACCTTGG at location 294 on chromosome 7, then she will have
a 12 times higher risk of breast cancer, the patent application must contain
that info.  Well now, I have my genome and I can go in there and read it.
So it isn't patents so much as it is trade secrets.  But these leak.
Humanity benefits.  

So I think all this is a good thing.  It is a bad thing for the FDA to stop
it.  If a patient perceives a higher risk of something, that patient should
be able to pay for extra diagnostics for that, ja?

spike