alt Hacker Newsif i recorded the video of "private home sequencing," what scene would be different? i suppose you would put the sample collector into some kind of not-yet-existent affordable device? and then what, you get an sd card?
all the value is in the analysis and sharing.
define insecure or exploitative. it is a very shallow argument to say, iNsUrAnCe cOmPaNiEs - genomic data harvested by insurance companies will never benefit the consumer, but we already have laws against that scenario, the technology doesn't really matter. or the narrow situation with, something something, medical research derived from tissues and the tissue-donators not given a just compensation? i don't know if that's exploitative. and people are already walking, insecure DNA-donators. you are surrounded by easily deanonymized DNA samples everywhere you walk right now...
Just to be clear, we are not ourselves working on private home sequencing.
I'm aware of people working on at-home devices but that is not our own approach.
We are just working on a mixing service to anonymize data user identities as their samples and data move through labs, logistics, etc.
Legal protections around genetic data can easily be rolled back in several ways, both incremental and drastic.
While it's true someone's DNA can easily be collected by a sufficiently motivated party, there is still a need at scale for something regular people can use to investigate their ancestry and predispositions without becoming datasets for unheeding organizations.
The 23andMe hacks, for example, should be a sobering realization that personal genomics is a systemic risk for several classes of people.