At FuturePundit, Randall Parker asks, if you have a right to "genetic privacy," and you don't want your genetic sequence published on the Web, would your identical twin have the right to disregard your wishes, or could you stop him from releasing the information?
Meanwhile Gene Expression's Razib Khan says this isn't a question that applies only to twins. People share about 50 percent of their genetic information with their parents or siblings, and even some percentage of their DNA with cousins or other relatives, Khan says. "If I just released my raw sequence by uploading it somewhere I would implicitly 'expose' to a non-trivial degree dozens of people (many without their knowledge)," he adds. But the risk involved is very low, he says. In theory, insurance companies could data-mine the Web for genetic information and then cross-reference it to find family members of the people who released their information in order to engage in "familial profiling," but "this seems absurd," Khan says. In an age where information is free-flowing, he adds, the idea of "privacy" needs to be "revisited."