Someday someone is going to invent a way to sample your DNA for under 1 USD, and all of this will be moot. Further, they will probably be able to do it by touch or by air.

Our problems stem because we take certain privacies for granted by the nature of them being impractical.

Humans are excellent at facial recognition. Yet it was inly when face recognition became automated that people cared. Yet there was no reason (legally) that someone couldnt have hired a mass of people to learn the faces of their customers. It was just impractical.

Same for license plate readers. We could just hire people to stand in street corners and log each livense plate number as it drives by--we just assume no one will do that.

Instead it seems we want to blame the technology--yet it seems to me we never had that privacy to begin with--we just assumed no one could gather it at scale.

It wouldn't surprise me if at some point, these the things become open secrets. That is--they are legally confidential, but in reality broadly known by anyone who is willing to ignore the law (sort of like how Americans social security numbers are all leaked). I don't know what the solution is.

"A Texas lawsuit led to the discovery that its Department of State Health Services was using newborn blood spots not only for research, but also as bartering chips with for-profit companies in exchange for lab equipment. And a subsequent Texas Tribune investigation revealed that the Texas health department had sent hundreds of newborn blood samples to the U.S. Armed Forces to build a national DNA database to help identify missing persons and solve cold cases, and also eventually build an international DNA registry for international law enforcement and anti-terrorism efforts."