Genetic Access Control Code Uses 23andMe DNA Data For Internet Racism

rjmarvin writes: A GitHub project is using the 23andMe API for genetic decoding to act as a way to bar users from entering websites based on their genetic data — race and ancestry. "Stumbling around GitHub, I came across this bit of code: Genetic Access Control. Now, budding young racist coders can check out your 23andMe page before they allow you into their website! Seriously, this code uses the 23andMe API to pull genetic info, then runs access control on the user based on the results. Just why you decide not to let someone into your site is up to you, but it can be based on any aspect of the 23andMe API. This is literally the code to automate racism."

Comments

Re:If race doesn't exist, how is this possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your hair colour is brown, then you'll have different genetic marks than someone with black hair.
If your skin colour is brown, then you'll have different genetic marks than someone with white skin.

Yet we don't separate brown/black hair into 'races'. Segregation into 'racial categories'/discrimmination against skin colour is a societal thing. So it doesn't matter what the genes say, this needs to be solved on a mental level.

Complex question

[DrYak]

I thought the narrative was that race doesn't exist? That we're all the same race?

Yup. We're all the same specie. "Race" is just an arbitrary label used to make convenient distinction among a group of individual that would other wise mate together : e.g.: breeds of dogs, etc.

How then is is possible that one can determine so called race by examining the genetic profile of a person?
Is it possible we were lied to and that race is indeed something that can be determined as a composition of genes and other genetic data?

Short answer: Nope, it's not possible.

Not so short answer: Well depend on what you define as "races" i.e.: you'll need to constantly redefine your arbitrary "race" label along as the set of gene that you try to use to map it. With that definition of "race" drifting farther and farther away from what biggots with an agenda would like it to be.

Long answer: Remember that the only valid real barrier is *specie*. i.e.: between groups that *cannot* mate together. Inside that division, all individual can mate together. Humans are specially good at that "mating" (well, maybe except some basement dweller): because from our dawn we've been one of the most mobile specie, only bested by birds and some big aquatic animals. Humans do tend to get around a lot. As a result our specie is constantly under heavy genetic mixing.

You can put some arbitrary labels (hey, let's put together individual that have darker skin tone in one big arbitrary bunch and call them niggers!)
You can even find some labels that are actually convenient (statistically, people who typically come from Caucasian ancestry tend to have a bit higher probability for some disease and a bit lower for others).

But if you got into the details, it starts to get muddy, you'll find that some people that you put in one of your arbitrary categories come from completely different lineage that split quite some time before, whereas other that you wanted to put out of that label actually share much more recent ancestry.
(That white supremacist biggot over there ? He want to be put in a special category, aside "non whites" ? well on the surface it might look like some vague idea like correlating it with skin pigmentation. Except that among those non-white he'll probably put native american, but also african and north african. And his grand-dad happens to be from an italian immigrant family, and over the course of history southern european have had a lot of exchange with northern africa. See where I'm heading ?)

So, in short what works well to separate breeds of dogs (which are bred in very controlled manners and you can somewhat keep something like a breed more or less pure) absolutely doesn't work with human that fuck around a lot.

Same for the genetics.
You'll be able to spot a few marker (let's say: a gene that helps control the base amount of melanin in the skin). But once you start using this, you'll notice that a lot of the "wrong people" end in the "wrong category".

That specific list of markers you've assembled together, will consider some of the white supremacists as non white (because of the complex mixed ancestry most people have) while failing to cast aside one of their usual target.

An idealist (like me) would dream that this would help some of the biggots to realise that we aren't that much different under the skin, we're so much mixed that there's a high probability that the biggot has a bit in their blood what their usual target is.

Saddly, the reality will be that they'll be still endlessly tweaking around their genetic definition of "race", to constantly keep itt more or less matching their agenda. They'll never have a definite set of markers, they'll constantly need to patch them. And over time it will evolve to something that at the genetic level doesn't remotely look like what they pretend to be (by the time they manage to include all their friend and exclude all their targets, melanin-related gene

Re:Do they have a choice?

[larwe]

1) Kuwait has introduced a law mandating DNA testing for everyone, already. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/... - it's required in order to get a government ID, and a government ID is required to live, basically. 2) In America, at least, the real problem with this code (and likely the real use case) is not blocking access to a website as an expression of "racism" (whatever that even means in this context), it would be using that profile to serve up content _selectively_. It's already been shown that Google gives different results to searches that include "black" names vs "white" ones: http://thevisualcommunicationg... - they could with perfect ease include this DNA data as an input signal to ad selection also. Searching for auto insurance? Your color blindness will cause the search to show worse deals. It's axiomatic that you should never, ever make unchangeable information with abuse potential of this sort accessible to anyone, if it can possibly be prevented.

Re:End of Mankind?

[larwe]

*Every* white person has "some proportion of non-white heritage", because the human species has pretty damn convincingly been shown to have evolved in Africa.

Re:So What

[AmiMoJo]

1. The person who made this uses the name "OffensiveComputing". You fell for what is clearly a troll project. Indeed, reading the description it's full of only slightly subtle MRA troll talking points and phrases, like the "safe spaces = assault on freedom of speech" meme.

2. 23andMe don't post your profile publicly or allow random websites to access it. You have to give permission to each web site. It's a major part of their service, because they only do the DNA testing part and offer some basic info about the result. The idea is that you can then take your profile to other sites and professionals who can interpret it or combine it with other tests. You know, like you would with an MRI scan. The guy doing the scan is just a technician, someone else interprets it.

You might still think that's dumb, but presumably you don't trust the hospital to keep your records on computer either and demand they are never transmitted to other hospitals electronically.