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
As a scientist I’m going to be a total wet blanket and make a broader statement agreeing with this: it’s unclear if actual effectiveness has a power law distribution, or if it’s merely the claims of effectiveness that have that distribution. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—the surprising part of the distribution is exactly the part we should be most suspicious of.
Of course, this is why we want GiveWell doing research into it. But I don’t think they should assume this distribution is true.