The Personal Genome Project doesn’t require people to share their identity publicly, but some participants would rather be public at the outset rather than have that information be pseudo-secret and a topic of gossip. It also opens the possibility of being directly contacted by someone who notices a health issue in your data.
At this point it’s clear that genomes can’t be anonymous, they can be linked back to an individual’s identity. See: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/321.abstract
The Personal Genome Project doesn’t require people to share their identity publicly, but some participants would rather be public at the outset rather than have that information be pseudo-secret and a topic of gossip. It also opens the possibility of being directly contacted by someone who notices a health issue in your data.
-- Madeleine
Fulltext: http://dcdc.wustl.edu/PDFs/2013-01-30_Article.pdf
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/12/AR2005111200958_pf.html is an interesting old example of defeating anonymization.
… And this isn’t being (ab)used by police yet?