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IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becoming a citizen could be useful, both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") and from a policing standpoint ("we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" or "we were able to identify this john doe because their DNA was on record"). However, given that companies and governments are awful, I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/
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.

You could potentially make DNA a 'protected class' of data, implying insuarance companies cannot look at it in their decision making, same as something like race.
> 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.

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.
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.

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.

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).

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

In some countries, when you go to work there they take full fingerprints (fingers, palm, etc.) plus a blood sample for DNA. Works extremely well in deterring crime.

From a technology perspective, it is really not that hard to keep all this on an air-gapped network and just run comparisons against it "offline" and get a result back with all the info you need when there is a match.

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.
As someone who loves Gattaca, no thanks !
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.

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
so, ultimately, it doesn't matter what the technology, the operative word is always "trusted government" and there isn't like, a replacement to "trusted government"; people who trust fascists will of course tell you they have a "Trusted government".

So it all really just comes back to implementing governance that has the correct leverage on power. America is definitely not that, and this will be abused in all manners if america continues down fascism.

Of course there's always things we just shouldn't store, like logs of password hashes or whatever, but most of reality hinged on "trusted government"

Subhuman zog
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
> Agency spreadsheets Georgetown obtained and analyzed show it sent the FBI the DNA of at least 1.36 million people between October 2020 and the end of 2024, more than a dozen times ICE's rate during the same time period.

So at the same time we saw a mass increase in border crossings we were also collecting their DNA? That's a huge number.

Framing things as protecting children from predators, corporations, governments, etc... seems to always be the justification given for and against any measure directed at them. Child trafficking is real. Governments are already moving toward age verification online. Most people seem to legitimately only care about privacy or children's protection when it serves as a bludgeoning tool for "their team." Consider me sufficiently jaded on this issue.
There’s a reason why Germany has extremely strict laws about how personally identifying information can be collected and stored.

America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.

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.

This behavior will continue until an actual consequence is introduced.
America voted for this.
Unless ICE was also collecting young children, it should say: "... including that of young children".
I mean, they have been collecting young children.
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we're officially in the "just try to stop us" phase of authoritarianism

next up, armed ICE around voting locations despite federal law

because "just try to stop us"

then refusal to seat voted delegates

because "just try to stop us"

the idea is to normalize the obscenity of it all, like the billions in wildly illegal grifting

king's image on buildings, airports, passports, park passes, coins and $250 bill

whitehouse demolished, fights on front lawn, statues covered in gold while people can't get healthcare or even food

people arrested and prosecuted at great expense then quietly dismissed

all normalized somehow without mass outrage

I mean, are YOU going to try to stop them?
They don't mention this, but one major reason for this is to validate claims of family units and prevent trafficking.

This is, I suspect, a good thing. The article never states any downsides, other then nebulous claims. Yes, DNA is like finger printing someone, which is routinely done for arrests, but has the benefit of assisting in claims of family relations, which is at the heart of many ICE concerns.

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.