Predictive Technology

WHO HAS YOUR DNA?

Using these home test kits because it gives away your DNA data to a company and you have no control over it afterwards. It also puts power into the hands of the customer and out of the hands of the doctors/medical establishment. It also tells those who are adopted about their genetics and family medical history.

Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers' DNA 10/16/15
Privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular. “Your relative's DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry's father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”
Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe stipulate in their privacy policies that they will turn information over to law enforcement if served with a court order. 23andMe says it's received a couple of requests from both state law enforcement and the FBI, but that it has “successfully resisted them.”

23andme Transparency Report
The (incredibly detailed) fine print of their privacy policy and started doing some research on genetic privacy. Even if you decide to opt-out of 23andMe's research program and don't give them any "Self-Reported" information, 23andMe still sells their partners more than enough data to connect your name and location (among other things) to your genetic information. For instance, 23andMe collects your "Web Behavior Information"...including your IP address, operating system, your ISP, browser type, cookies, anything you mention in your emails to customer support, and worst of all: web beacons. These are special cookies that track all of your browsing history. A cookie from Facebook can instantly give 23andMe access to your FB profile name. Any profile picture you post on 23andMe can be downloaded by an app developer. App developers are given access to your traits. How many people in a specific zip code of a small town have 1) red, curly hair 2) are good at sprinting 3) have bad teeth 4) poor memory 5) and diabetes? All of this data -- combined with your "web behavior and genetic information -- makes it incredibly easy for any app developer (or drug company) to identify you (even if the developer (technically) only has access to your "anonymous" id number). It is especially easy to identify males who have some sort of relatively uncommon disease. This is a big issue in politics right now. It is called "re-identification" in case you want to learn more about it. You can also google "23andMe's API." Overall, 23andMe's privacy FAQ is very misleading, and possibly illegal.

The Sorenson Molecular Geneology Foundation {SMGF} Database is the foremost collection of genetic genealogy data in the world. Search by DNA results or surname and find your place in the worldwide genetic family tree.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080706080545/http://www.smgf.org/

23andMe has sparked a revolution in how the medical profession uses genetic information. Change like that rarely, if ever, comes from within an industry; it's almost always driven by people on the outside with new approaches and technologies that disrupt old paradigms -- like the idea that genomics aren't something "ordinary" doctors need to understand or that patients shouldn't be active, informed participants in their healthcare.

How 23andme.com Company Got Started
Home genetic test maker 23andMe, which is backed by Google Inc, stopped marketing its products last week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that it did not have regulatory approval to do so, a company spokeswoman said. The company stopped television, radio and online advertising for its $99 DNA test which is supposed to detect a range of genetic variants and provide information about a person's health risks, the spokeswoman said. The FDA said last week it had sent a warning letter to the company on November 22 stating that products designed to diagnose, mitigate or prevent disease were medical devices that required regulatory clearance.

23andMe Inc., the Google Inc.-backed DNA analysis company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, was told by U.S. regulators to halt sales of its main product because it's being sold without “marketing clearance or approval.” Wojcicki, who recently separated from her husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, started 23andMe about six years ago to help people assess their risk of cancer, heart disease and other medical conditions. Brin used the saliva kit to determine he had a gene that makes him susceptible to Parkinson's.

23andme isn't just google backed, it's the personal project of the wife of a Google co-founder. That same google that has working relationships with the NSA and those nasty folks. Same google out collecting everything about everyone, everywhere. People have been willingly and even paying, to send DNA to google for years. We also know the FDA has been at this since 2009.
https://www.google.com/patents/US20110218850

Want life insurance?

23andMe also has a patent on determining life expectancy based on genomic information that can be utilized by life insurance providers. Ponder that one for a moment. You could be as fit as a fiddle but have predispositions for certain ailments later in life that could influence any life insurance policy that you try to obtain in the future. The rather humorous thing about this one is the fact that Goog--I mean 23andMe--complains about monopoly issues. https://www.google.com/patents/WO2010148291A1

Ancestry.com had the DNA home testing kits as well.

12/3/13 23ANDME AND ANCESTORY.COM HOME DNA TEST KITS SHUT DOWN
Today, the FDA shut down further sales of the saliva home-test kit, citing the "potential health consequences that could result from false positive or false negative assessments for high-risk indications... For instance, if the BRCA-related risk assessment for breast or ovarian cancer reports a false positive, it could lead a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery, chemoprevention, intensive screening, or other morbidity-inducing actions, while a false negative could result in a failure to recognize an actual risk that may exist."

DNA testing firm 23andMe relaunches health tests in US
A company has relaunched in the US after the Food and Drug Administration approved its DNA tests for 36 diseases. 23andMe's health reports covered 254 inherited diseases before being banned by the FDA in 2013, and it is still not allowed to quantify the risk of a user developing one of the 36 conditions. But it will be able to say whether they are a carrier of any of the conditions and the risk of passing it to children.

2013 Big Data And You: How Your 'Likes' Reveal Sexuality, Race, Drug Use, And Your Parents' Divorce
Facebook knows you're gay before you do because Predictive models become even more accurate as more data is collected. Facebook users that click "like" on a variety of cultural subjects reveal a surprisingly large amount of information about themselves even if they've taken steps to tighten up their privacy settings.
A recently published study by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK and Microsoft Research, used an automated analysis of 58,000 volunteers' Facebook "likes" to make highly accurate predictions about a person's private and very sensitive personal attributes.
The authors of the study: "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior" claim that they were able to use "easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes," to accurately predict a wide range of attributes that included: Sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

DARPA Seeking to Develop a "Cognitive Fingerprint"
Excerpt:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is out this month with a broad agency announcement soliciting "innovation research proposals in support of the development of new software-based biometric modalities" that go beyond the current focus of passwords for identity validation: The current standard method for validating a user's identity for authentication on an information system requires humans to do something that is inherently difficult: create, remember, and manage long, complex passwords. Moreover, as long as the session remains active, typical systems incorporate no mechanisms to verify that the user originally authenticated is the user still in control of the keyboard. Thus, unauthorized individuals may improperly obtain extended access to information system resources if a password is compromised or if a user does not exercise adequate vigilance after initially authenticating at the console.

Dr. Norman Packard Ph.D is former CEO and co-founder of Prediction Company, which was acquired by Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in 2005 for its data management and trading system . His role at Lucky Sort follows over two decades of experience in chaos theory, learning algorithms, predictive modeling of complex systems, statistical analysis of evolution, artificial life, and complex adaptive systems. Prior to his move from academia to business in 1991, Dr. Packard was associate professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Google, CIA Invest in Future of Web Monitoring Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance Recorded Future , and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents both present and still-to-come.

TWITTER MAKES MONEY SPREADING FAKE NEWS

How to Predict the Spread of News on Twitter
Computer scientists have discovered the four factors that make news stories popular on Twitter. "Our experiments show that it is possible to estimate ranges of popularity with an overall accuracy of 84% considering only content features." We examine both regression and classification algorithms and demonstrate that despite randomness in human behavior, it is possible to predict ranges of popularity on twitter with an overall 84% accuracy . Our study also serves to illustrate the differences between traditionally prominent sources and those immensely popular on the social web. Bernardo Huberman and pals at HP's Social Computing Lab in Palo Alto used this approach to predict the eventual box office revenues based on the rate of tweets about a film soon after it was released.