July 28, 2015

Recreational genotyping: potentially creepy?

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Two stories from this morning’s Twitter (via @kristinhenry)

  • 23andMe has made available a programming interface (API) so that you can access and integrate your genetic information using apps written by other people.  Someone wrote and published code that could be used to screen users based on sex and ancestry. (Buzzfeed, FastCompany). It’s not a real threat, since apps with more than 20 users need to be reviewed by 23andMe, and since users have to agree to let the code use their data, and since Facebook knows far more about you than 23andMe, but it’s not a good look.
  • Google’s Calico project also does cheap public genotyping and is combining their DNA data (more than a million people) with family trees from Ancestry.com. This is how genetic research used to be done: since we know how DNA is inherited, connecting people with family trees deep into the past provides a lot of extra information. On the other hand, it means that if a few distantly-related people sign up for Calico genotying, Google will learn a lot about the genomes of all their relatives.

It’s too early to tell whether the people who worry about this sort of thing will end up looking prophetic or just paranoid.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

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