I don’t see the advantage of publicizing the identity of the donor of genetic information. What is gained by making public the fact ‘this genome belongs to this individual’?
The Personal Genome Project doesn’t require people to share their identity publicly, but some participants would rather be public at the outset rather than have that information be pseudo-secret and a topic of gossip. It also opens the possibility of being directly contacted by someone who notices a health issue in your data.
I don’t see the advantage of publicizing the identity of the donor of genetic information. What is gained by making public the fact ‘this genome belongs to this individual’?
At this point it’s clear that genomes can’t be anonymous, they can be linked back to an individual’s identity. See: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/321.abstract
The Personal Genome Project doesn’t require people to share their identity publicly, but some participants would rather be public at the outset rather than have that information be pseudo-secret and a topic of gossip. It also opens the possibility of being directly contacted by someone who notices a health issue in your data.
-- Madeleine
Fulltext: http://dcdc.wustl.edu/PDFs/2013-01-30_Article.pdf
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/12/AR2005111200958_pf.html is an interesting old example of defeating anonymization.
… And this isn’t being (ab)used by police yet?