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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."
So visitors to his website:
* Must have been sequenced by 23andMe
* And be so interested in his website that they are willing to give him access to their genetic data
* And meet whatever genetic filter he has imposed.
At this point, what he is running is less of a 'website', more of a 'diary', as it will have only one reader.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The problem is that with enough uptake it's no longer a self-extinguishing problem, but a shutting-you-out problem. No DNA profile with that third party website? No access to facebook, google+, whatnot else. With even governments (like, infamously, the UK gov't) considering using facebook profiles to "authenticate" citizens for access to government services, it's easy to see that this may well end badly.
And you can't really leave this to "the market" because it inherently shuts out the negative control feedback, since shut-out people have no voice. A bit like the breakage and shutting out of visitors by "upgrading" your website to cloudflare -- and cloudflare deciding some visitors are really spambots even though they're merely behind CGNAT that cloudflare didn't know about, for example -- that may or may not even be visible in site stats.
Would you mind being an overlooked minority statistic if that means complete loss of access to, say, all government services?
So while "don't play ball" is a good start, it may well not be enough.
If everyone was a single homogeneous skin color, the exact same discriminations would be occurring on the basis of eye color, or eyelash color, or penis length. It just happens to be a big, easy to read signal differentiating "us" from "not us". (Actually I think the answer to "why skin color" has a lot to do with the fact that white races were isolated from black races for a long time after they, y'know, evolved from an originally black common ancestor, and when they did meet black people again it was in a conqueror/enslaver vs conquered/enslaved context).
The study, and the related hoopla (this is just one link), was designed to indicate that Google uses a non-obvious, racially skewed signal as an input to search and advertising results. Actually, they probably use more than one such signal. Oversimplified: if I am logged in as "Wilfred Fortescue-Smythe-Smythe III" and search for "bonds" I'll probably see advertising/results for investment vehicles. If I am logged in as "Taneisha Williams" and search for "bonds" I'll more likely see advertising/results for bail bonds. It's important to note that there is NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER that Google designs intentionally racist ad-ranking algorithms; they have too much to lose. What this phenomenon demonstrates is that complex, probably nondeterministic algorithms that sum a buttload of signals, which are designed to exploit demographic/psychographic characteristics to group users by willingness to purchase, can as an epiphenomenon amplify and expose demographic differences in purchasing behavior, some of which differences might cause political trouble with people in a given demographic who compare results with a different demographic. (This works both ways. Some of these "discriminatory" results give higher pricing on things to people in a "rich" demographic).