At his Genetic Future blog, Daniel MacArthur follows up a previous post on the ethical challenges of managing genome data once it's in the hands of consumers. In this post, he looks at what's actually out there, in the realm of publicly available databases; there’s OMIM, SNPedia, and the HuGE Navigator, all of which employ different methods to get relevant SNP data. But even though these are all free, he thinks that "although a clever lay-person (with a lot of time on their hands, and preferably with some programming skills) could manage to extract some useful information out of their own raw genetic information, at this stage there's really no public database that could compete with the proprietary browsers of personal genomics companies like 23andMe and deCODEme."