I'm 2.8% Neanderthal - The Beginning of Genetic Exhibitionism?
Résumé
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is gaining popularity. How- ever, the sensitive nature of personal genomic sequencing re- sults might not be fully understood by the general public. In this paper we study the examples of disclosure of this sen- sitive information on social networks. We found that Twit- ter users often post their results publicly. We observed that information on ethnic background is much more frequently released than other information, for example relating to dis- ease risk. This data could be of potential value to entities such as insurance companies.We found that about 24% of the analyzed tweets that men- tioned ethnicity results also contained percentage data. In cases of users disclosing more details of their ethnic back- ground, we found about 96% of these profiles also included identifying information and consequently can be attributed to individuals.As a result, external entities such as insurance companies can gain an insight in the genetic test results and in the end the users could be subject to genetic discrimination.