Comment by jedberg
1 day ago
Did you know that the State of California has a DNA sample from every person born in the state since 1983? It's required by law for the hospital to collect it and give it to the state.
1 day ago
Did you know that the State of California has a DNA sample from every person born in the state since 1983? It's required by law for the hospital to collect it and give it to the state.
This is a particularly incendiary way of putting this information out there.
What is collected and stored is a small blood-spot sample from a heel prick on a newborn. This is used to test for various kinds of conditions that affect newborns.
This isn't a full DNA genome sequence or even any data at all, just the blood-spot specimen.
Law enforcement does not have automatic access to this sample, but individual samples have been given to law enforcement through court orders or warrants. There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information or how often it's given to law enforcement, but there's been proposed legislation to make this more transparent.
The blood sample isn’t a DNA sample right up until the point they decide to sequence it. This is the same legal doctrine allowing the government to systematically collect all of your personal data without violating your privacy as long they don’t look at what they collect without a warrant.
The government has granted themselves an option on your personal data that can’t be revoked.
I agree with you in principle. And I agree that the government has been steadily eroding our privacy. And I agree that California probably shouldn't be retaining these samples forever.
However, the likelihood of being able to "sequence" the biomatter on a blood spot is quite low, and the probability of getting good signal out of it continues to go down over time. It'll still remain useful for various kinds of spot testing and genetic disease testing, but it's not going to produce a fully validated genomic sequence or even be that useful for forensic purposes.
This isn't some sort of sealed blood vial, it's literally just blood on paper.
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I agree but the State has already the monopoly on violence, which is something that only the State has. If they have a warrant, they can also break into your private property and you have to accept it. This is not too dissimilar.
They can arrest you (with a warrant) and take your DNA whenever they want so I don't see what your point is.
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> but individual samples have been given to law enforcement through court orders or warrants.
Then I can easily guarantee you that individual samples have been given to law enforcement _without_ orders or warrants.
> There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information
Which means there is zero oversight, logging, or auditing.
> This is a particularly incendiary way of putting this information out there.
Was it inaccurate?
It's about as accurate a Buzzfeed headline, but I guess that's par for the course on the internet these days.
It's not a "DNA sample" in the way that most people would consider it these days, no more than a used cup would also be called a "DNA sample". But to your point, it can still be used for surveillance and tracking.
Also, your phrasing is designed to make it seem like a huge overreach, when this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities. I have personally experienced this.
So yes, I do think your framing here is inaccurate through omission of key facts.
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the implication was misleading, yes. the implication being that California has database of its citizens' genetic data. when the reality is that CA has a _physical sample_ of blood.
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It's very inaccurate.
OP made it sound like Cali was genome sequencing everyone born in the state and then storing that.
What's really going on is they're doing routine blood tests.
So yeah, pretty inaccurate.
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it was misinformation, the DNA in such a sample is not only miniscule and unstandardized, but also not treated for longterm archival specimen retention.
the blood "spot" is about general morphology, and antigenic specificity.
It is as accurate as any of the incendiary Pravda propaganda pieces[1] about how the capitalist swine lived. Other posters have helpfully pointed out the specifics of why your particular spin on it is not entirely honest.
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[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.
No, they are correct, and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They have a DNA sample of everyone. Those samples haven't been sequenced. As you've pointed out, they are sequenced when the state needs them to be.
It would be like scanning your drivers license and putting it in a sealed envelope and claiming "I don't have your home address!", when I'm known to get the home address from other peoples envelopes when asked for it.
At least they can't trawl them for random matches when they're like that, the cost of sequencing is a barrier. Probably even more in that a 20 year old blood spot on a piece of paper isn't an ideal DNA sample.
> This is used to test for various kinds of conditions that affect newborns.
Then why do they keep the samples?
Because the US has laughably weak privacy laws and most Americans snicker at the EU GDPR because of "cookie banners" (which btw isn't a thing - most consent dialogs are non-compliant as they shouldn't serve to just inform you but to actually obtain voluntary, revokable and specific informed consent) instead of thinking about what it means to actually have a fundamental human right to privacy and ownership of your own data or not.
They keep the samples for the same reason US tech startups keep deleted data and track seemingly useless behavior. Because they might find a use for it someday and there's literally no law preventing them from doing it.
"There isn't a clear SOP for how law enforcement typically gets this information..."
Then no, it wasn't an incendiary claim.
Ag puhleez
Do you have a source? I know there is an index[0] of the information on California birth certificates from 1905 to 1995 and technically, despite the privacy implications, birth records in California are considered "public record".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Birth_Index
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/Pages/nbs/default....
I just got back from the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK and was marveling at the size of a small footprint facility that stores samples of more than 10% of all known living plants.
Reading this thread, I was curious about what the size of California's sample collection looks like. I made an estimate using a little 1ul vial and an estimated 40 million people born in California since 1930. 100 samples in each box means 400,000 boxes. It's something like a 60 foot by 60 foot room with shelving.
If you extended it to a bank of 100 billion (about all humans ever born), that gets you to a pretty low tech solution that stores samples in the footprint of five Costcos.
California has been storing the samples in its biobank since 1983 not 1930.
What about people born outside of a hospital?
... The concept of DNA sample collection existed in 1983?
They actually started in 1966 (it's a blood spot collection) but they only started keeping it in 1983.
And what information did they hope to glean back then?
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/tag/newborn-blood-spot-pr...
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The trick is that you don't elect someone like Donald Trump. I just read on the BBC that the president of America threatened New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani.
People in the Netherlands trust their government because noone in the 500 years of history has ever gotten close to getting dictatorial power unless you count Napoleon and Hitler.
Why does Belgium exist? Is it because the Flemish revolted against Dutch rule?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Revolution
Despite the downvotes you are right that democracies mostly deliver what voters want. And if voters want silly things, they get silly things.
It's easy to fret at how dysfunctional and insane politics are. But after you talk to some actual voters (and look at opinion polls), instead you marvel at how comparatively sane policies manage to be---despite voters.