privacy | linkstream2 microblog

Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA — trace amounts of genetic material that all living things leave behind….The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens.

But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it’s pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose?

New DNA collecting techniques are “like catnip” for law enforcement officials, says Erin Murphy, a law professor at the New York University School of Law who specializes in the use of new
technologies in the criminal legal system. The police have been quick to embrace unproven tools, like using DNA to create probability-based sketches of a suspect.
…
As a proof of concept in one of their experiments, the researchers scooped up a soda-can-size sample of water from a creek in St. Augustine, Fla. They then fed the genetic material from the sample through a nanopore sequencer, which allows researchers to read longer stretches of DNA. The one they used cost about $1000, is the size of a cigarette lighter and plugs into a laptop like a flash drive.

From the samples, the team recovered much more legible human DNA than they had anticipated. And as knowledge expands about human genetics, analysis of even limited samples can reveal a wealth of information. …

That highlights the possibility that law enforcement officials could use eDNA collected at crime scenes to incriminate people, even though wildlife ecologists who developed the techniques say the science isn’t mature enough for such purposes. Scientists have yet to pin down the fundamentals of eDNA, like how it travels through air or water or how it degrades over time. And nanopore sequencing — the technology that allowed Dr. Duffy’s team to find longer and more informative DNA fragments — still has a much higher error rate than older
technologies, meaning an unusual genetic signature that seems like a promising lead could be a red herring.
….

“There’s an imbalance in almost all systems of the world between what law enforcement is allowed to do, versus publicly funded research, versus private companies,” said Barbara Prainsack, a professor at the University of Vienna who studies the regulation of DNA technology in medicine and forensics.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/science/environmental-dna-ethics-privacy.html

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The Search for a New and Better Internet | The New Yorker

March 9, 2024

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/can-the-internet-be-governed
QT:{{”
Each now possesses a twelve-digit identity number, known as an Aadhaar (Hindi for “foundation”), which is linked to biometric information such as iris scans and fingerprints. But Nilekani’s real achievement has been to use the I.D. numbers as the underpinnings of an integrated digital ecology (“the stack”). It consists of government-enabled modules (collectively referred to as digital public infrastructure, or D.P.I.) that allow citizens to make online payments, receive welfare, conduct banking, and store and certify official documents (e.g., covid-vaccine certificates).
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