We Hereby Release Our Family’s Genomes to the Public Domain
March 7, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Download page:
http://manuelcorpas.com/five-family-relatives-genome-download/
After some deliveration and with informed consent from all family members involved, four relatives in my family, Mom, Dad, Sister and Aunt are releasing their 23andMe genomes together with mine to the public domain.
Genealogic tree of family, indicating three generations. Male and female are denoted as squares and circles respectively. Filled shapes denote available 23andMe genomes. The red diamond indicates Manuel Corpas’ position in the tree.
A page has been created that describes the origins, the genealogic tree and the data. A detailed explanation is offered on how to access, download and visualize this data using myKaryoView, a personal genomics visualization client.
The license for using this data allows any use of it as long as ‘the Corpas family’ is acknowledged. Please note that we have changed our license under an even more permissive license. More details can be found in the download page. Although not required, we would appreciate if you could report us back any knowledge you find with this data. We would very much love to hear of any results obtained from using these genotypes.
I don’t want privacy to be dead
February 16, 2010 § 1 Comment
“Privacy is dead. Get over it”. People who have famously said this or something similar include Scott McNealy (CEO Sun Microsystems), Eric Schmidt (CEO Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook).
Some of the reasons that justify why not having privacy is OK include “if you do something that you want nobody to know, maybe you should not do it on the first place” or “people are ever more comfortable with sharing information about themselves”.
These arguments are all well and good. However, the other side of the coin is when personal information is used by strangers to take advantage of the person, let alone potential misinterpretations or simply gossip.
Is this interconnectedness worth exchanging for personal privacy? ‘Clever’ algorithms are constantly crawling the web in search of personal information. The degree to which these algorithms are more effective at spamming you is proportional to the amount of public information about you on the web.
Have you ever said anything or joined an internet group you would rather not join now? Unfortunately it is likely that this information will never disappear. Even if you delete it from your profile, it is probable that some web crawling algorithm has stored that information somewhere.
It has only been until recently when users have a tighter control over the information they make available to the web in Facebook for instance. Default settings are indeed terrifying in terms of the information of one’s profile made available to search engines.
Despite the possibility of being able to control how much information one makes public, this is not the end of the story: I have found situations where pieces of information in my profile were picked by a friend without me knowing it. True, it is specified in the settings how much you want to make public. Nevertheless, even though I have unselected information from my public profile, who knows who would have looked at it.
Not that I have anything to hide but I would rather keep quiet about my personal interests rather than sharing them widely. Surely a better knowledge of my personal profile could facilitate the way to finding more easily passwords and even breaking into my bank account.
Have we now reached a point of no return in privacy?
Probably.
