California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a “consumer alert” in the wake of its bankruptcy regarding the “trove of sensitive consumer data 23andMe has amassed.” Bonta reminded Californians that they have the right to direct the company to delete their genetic data.
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What about individual data is so important? Why should people worry that they’ve left a spot of saliva as a DNA sequence in some company database? Surely they are just a drop of water in an endless sea. But as the forensic DNA revolution showed, even drops in the ocean can be told apart. Perhaps our attitude to individual inconsequence has changed. The 23andMe incident illustrates the overthrow of the 20th-century view of individual insignificance in the great statistical aggregation
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