Top Genetic Testing Firms Promise Not To Share Data Without Consent (washingtonpost.com)

Ancestry, 23andMe and several other top genetic testing companies pledged on Tuesday not to share users' DNA data with others without consent. "Under the new guidelines, the companies said they would obtain consumers "separate express consent" before turning over their individual genetic information to businesses and other third parties, including insurers," reports The Washington Post. "They also said they would disclose the number of law-enforcement requests they receive each year." From the report: The new commitments come roughly three months after local investigators used a DNA-comparison service to track down a man police believed to be the Golden State Killer, who allegedly raped and killed dozens of women in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Investigators identified the suspect using a decades-old DNA sample obtained from the crime scene, which they uploaded to GEDmatch, a crowdsourced database of roughly a million distinct DNA sets shared by volunteers. Investigators said they did not need a court order before using GEDmatch, sparking fresh fears that users' biological data might be too easy to access -- and could end up in the wrong hands -- without additional regulation on the fast-growing, already popular industry.

Comments

It's about the derived data

[mrwireless]

Databrokers and companies like this rarely sell raw data. They feed the raw data into algorithms to generate thousands of scores. For example, Cambridge Analytica created a psychological profile based on raw Facebook data.

In the USA these scores are protected as a form of corporate free speech. "they are just opinions".

As long as the public debate doesn't distinguish between these two types of data, then companies will continue to be able to make claims like this which don't address the real issue. What we really need to know is: do they generate and sell derived data?