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UC Berkeley Asking Incoming Students For DNA
peterofoz writes "The students will be asked to voluntarily submit a DNA sample. The cotton swabs will come with two bar code labels. One label will be put on the DNA sample and the other is kept for the students' own records. The confidential process is being overseen by Jasper Rine, a campus professor of Genetics and Development Biology, who says the test results will help students make decisions about their diet and lifestyle." No word in the story on just what "confidential" means — who will have access to the results, how long they'll be kept, or what else they might someday be used for. Will the notoriously liberal Berkeley campus see this as a service or an invasion of privacy?
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Ivy League colleges took naked pictures of every incoming freshman, supposedly for use in scientific studies of the students' posture.
I am not making this up. See, e.g., this Times coverage from 1995.
I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement about whether people should say Yes to Cal's offer, here, but just wanted to point out that weird-ass instrusions into student privacy are nothing new.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
the Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges, ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos
Read the article, please. The request is in the welcome package for new students, not the application. Thus, "signals" in the application process are not an issue. The only people getting the request are those who already know that they have been accepted.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
... umm, did you miss the part of the story where they *aren't* storing the student's identity with the DNA? I could walk outside for an hour or two and get a couple hundred random DNA samples from random strangers for study, and have absolutely no more idea who they belong to. Since our DNA just sort of falls off of us terribly easily.
The profiles aren't connected to students names, records, SSN, identities, nothing. Just a random number encoded in a barcode. The only way anyone can know that 123456789 happens to be you is if you tell them or show them your barcode.
Its research. And an interesting service.
Yes, the tinfoil hat wearing can argue that between IP logs and cookies and such, someone could probably figure out your identity if they really wanted to.
But then they can also just get your DNA from your *skin cells* that you shed all the time. And if they were going to be nefarious like that, the usage of that DNA sample for any random purpose against your interests would probably be legal: you have no expectation of privacy there.
Someone who would be described as liberal in the US has what the rest of the world would call "center left economic opinions" - not socialist.
Libertarian, on the other hand means bat-shit-crazy wherever you go.