A photo from open sources
Most of us will not like it very much, if it is not clear who will gain access to information that is not intended for strangers and password protected: photos, personal correspondence with discussion of common acquaintances and all sorts of innocent nonsense about which nobody but close friends needs to know.
If you are concerned about the security of your personal space though at this level, then compared with the threats that await us in In the near future, this is all the most perfect kindergarten. Your DNA may be such a gap in the security of personal data, which in a nightmare could not have dreamed.
It’s no secret that personal genetic information today is of great interest to science, especially to biomedicines. The individual human genome has a great the effect on how the body responds to treatment. Pass completely few years and doctors will start using genetic information for treating patients.
With the spread of genetic medicine, of course, everything more people will resort to genetic tests, therefore more and more genetic information will accumulate in specific database. As a result, personal information may be at risk because any database, as we know, can be hacked.
What kind of information could this be for an attacker? your genome? While a little, but the situation is changing rapidly. In the near the future, the person who has your genome, will be able to determine your nationality, skin color, tendency to be overweight, addiction from alcohol, do you suffer from diseases like bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, the likelihood of cancer diseases, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, not to mention to find out who your real father is.
How quickly can this kind of information be obtained has become clear thanks to an experiment by a group of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Yaniv Erlich. At students were able to help publicly available information calculate anonymous volunteers who donated their genetic data for the sake of science. The most unpleasant thing is the information that helped students in their search, was usually posted online not even by the volunteers themselves, but by their distant relatives.
These distant relatives, in our case all men, were genealogy website users. They laid out data on their Y chromosomes in a database called Ysearch, which contains the names and data of the Y chromosomes of humans. A since both surnames and Y chromosomes are transmitted from fathers, the base Ysearch can be used as a kind of dictionary that translates data of Y chromosomes into surnames, even those people data which is not in this database. Enter someone’s details Y chromosomes and you will get the most likely surname the owner.
This is exactly what the researchers of Massachusetts did. Institute of Technology with the genetic information from anonymous volunteers. Having received the names, presumably owned by volunteers, students climbed into other databases, like PeopleFinder.com and finally identified people. Of ten people managed to completely “declassify” five.
The lower the cost of genetic tests, the easier it will be access this information. So far, threats related to theft genetic data, exists only in theory, but now stands think about how to protect yourself in the future.
Lesson we can learn from the Massachusetts experiment University, is that each of us – patients of hospitals, research institutes and clinics offering to go through genetic testing – should relate to keeping your genetic information with no less caution than we We treat the storage of our personal and financial information.
In the near future, thanks to genetic information, you can will learn much more interesting about you than thanks compromising corporate photos that you diligently password protect.
DNA
