Researchers are now vacuuming DNA from the air

Even as a big privacy advocate, I don't see much reason to be especially concerned.

The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking.

Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do.

There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could.

It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.

Surely the police will start mass collection after the technology is commercialized, to solve theoretical crimes. And then claim that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, since you freely decided to leave the house and knowingly start shedding DNA in public.

Flock Safety but for DNA is inevitable.

We're already filmed by several cameras any time we're out in public. We're also tracked by our phones, unless we turn them off.

Privacy of what places you visit is already pretty much dead. We're the last generation who lived like that.

I'm not saying this is good or bad. Just that it is, and we have to adapt.

Surely it should be possible to spoof presence as well. Non-repudiation is not possible with this alone.

Yeah at what point do we look back at this type of tech and say "the researchers surely knew this was going to be used in a bad way" and then blame them for it?

Like, I get it. The argument that "maybe the tech will be used for good" is an easy one to make. But given how tech is being used more and more for bad these days, surely it's harder to make that moral argument to justify this continued research?

Just because you can come up with one or two good reasons for the tech to exist, doesn't mean you get to ignore the overwhelming amount of reasons it shouldn't.

Internet of Smells

The world is wired. Is bathed in wi-fi waves. It is also full of smell.

Eve and Adam meet at a party. Both are good looking, the kind which is so clean that it looks almost puppet like.

When Adam sees Eve and approaches her, Eve is at first welcoming. Her sniffer ring sends her a message. (The sniffer ring is just a ring with a feather moving somehow between a dog tail and a butterfly wing. It is of course connected to the wired/wifi network.)

The message reads: "Adam has a very bad form of cancer. Is not good genetic material to mate with".

As the polite behaviour rules dictate, Eve forwards the notice to Adam, maybe as a visual message, or as a message which appears on his health wristband, then she moves away, looking for other interesting people.

Adam is only mildly concerned. He contacts, privately, his internet+health insurance provider and files a bug request. Then he goes along with the party.

The next scene happens somewhere far, visible from the external conditions (like for example it is day there, while at the party place was night) and from the people in this scene (for example while Adam and Eve might be porcelaine figures, maybe blonds, or maybe japonese, the guys in the new scene are more like indians or pakistani.)

So these are a bunch of Mechanical Turks in a internet cafe like place in India (for example). They receive Adam's bug ticket. We can see one of them, or several doing various stuff on their not so modern computers, but one of them opens on his screen Adam's request.

We can see that the screen has two windows open, one is a REPL Lisp window, the other is a molecular simulation. (This is a hook for a technical audience, important as any hacker movie screenshot.)

On the Lisp REPL there is an error message. The Mechanical Turk fixes it, then runs a molecular simulation. It works.

He then opens a smell convertor. (Variant, he opens "Nozzle", which is just like Google page visually, he searches for a RNA like word, then he hits enter.) Job done.

The third scene is Adam bedroom. He sleeps, not at all concerned, something between a puppet and a child in his bed.

Travelling to a detail in his room, which looks alike the sniffer ring, only that it is a wifi router with a feather. Lights flicker and the feather begins to swosh.

Travelling to the health bracelet of Adam. Shows: "Bug request solved. Status: healty".

The night is quiet and peaceful. The sunrise begins. Adam dreams something nice.

End.

everyone already leaves DNA everywhere, so it doesn’t seem like a step change.

genetic privacy is a good thing but is utterly artificial, we have to create it if we want it.