[HN Gopher] DNA floating in the air tracks wildlife, viruses, ev...
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DNA floating in the air tracks wildlife, viruses, even drugs
Author : karlperera
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-06-16 09:38 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedaily.com)
| karlperera wrote:
| If this tech becomes widespread and cheap, what are the privacy
| implications of being able to sequence human DNA floating in the
| air in any public or private space? It feels like a classic 'can
| we/should we' problem.
| blankx32 wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts, but once the cat is out of the bag
| fecal_henge wrote:
| ..then there is cat DNA left inside the bag?
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| 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.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| This is NOT new tech. As old at least as generating sequence
| from low-copy number and fragment fossil specimens. This
| "news" is just a tweak and PR piece. Qualeed explains why
| this is a non-issue for forensics.
| arddcootvt178 wrote:
| 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.
| checker659 wrote:
| Surely it should be possible to spoof presence as well. Non-
| repudiation is not possible with this alone.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| About the same as being able to sequence dna left on a doorknob
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even.
| RunningDroid wrote:
| > Most new phones are trackable even if they are off, even.
|
| For anyone wondering how this works: the cellular modem is
| a separate general-purpose computer that runs code from the
| manufacturer and the service provider, the only thing
| needed to allow tracking a phone that's off is circuitry to
| allow the modem to draw power independent of the rest of
| the phone.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Another good reason to prefer phones with physical
| switches to cut off the radios. Or removable batteries.
| Or both.
|
| I guess a faraday pouch might be helpful, but I recall
| reading these aren't really as effective as many people
| believe.
| lazide wrote:
| I've had an iPhone receive a call inside a locked steel
| 50 cal ammo can. No clue how that is possible, but it
| happened.
|
| I guess the gasket let enough EM through?
|
| Amusingly, crumpled aluminum foil seems to have a better
| track record.
| geysersam wrote:
| What's the purpose of such contraptions?
| lazide wrote:
| Find my phone (as a benign example!) doesn't work very
| well if you can't find it if it's off.
| qualeed wrote:
| 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.
| rvnx wrote:
| You can clone fingerprint like here:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30623611
|
| Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds
| that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that
| it is real.
|
| Same for DNA then.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the
| odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility
| that it is real.
|
| >Same for DNA then._
|
| There's a world of difference between cloning a
| fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like
| fluids), and this technology.
|
| The air might carry the particulates to areas never
| traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints.
|
| Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling
| to a different city could imply that thousands of people
| have gone to a city they never went to before. Not
| happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA.
|
| The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in
| privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless
| for court, and more easily game-able than any other
| biometric by _a lot_.
|
| To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics
| because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than
| the possibility that it is real.
| mc32 wrote:
| It can. "Door knobs" can be removed from place A and
| installed in location B. Or a weapon can also be placed
| somewhere else...
| qualeed wrote:
| This requires action by someone else (who also risks
| leaving behind evidence).
|
| The airborne stuff just spreads by itself. To far more
| places, far quicker, _all the time_.
| mc32 wrote:
| Granted; but concentration would go down at something
| like inverse of some exponential of the distance from
| source.
| qualeed wrote:
| Sure.
|
| My point isn't that this isn't a biometric or something.
|
| My point is that it is the _weakest_ biometric, full of
| noise, constantly contaminated, easily forged with no
| skill set or technology required, with a _very_ high
| false-positive rate when used for anything privacy-
| related.
|
| There are so many more things (technology, policy, etc.),
| literally violating people's right to privacy at this
| very moment, that trying to spin this as a theoretically
| privacy-damaging technology strikes me as a bit
| ridiculous.
| amelius wrote:
| Still great for tracking people though.
|
| Also, if with p=0.99 you were at the strip club yesterday
| evening, then you have something to explain.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _Still great for tracking people though._
|
| No, no it isn't.
|
| Cameras, license plate readers, air tags, phones,
| literally just stalking someone, and that sort of thing
| is great for tracking people.
|
| They are easier, vastly less prone to false positives,
| etc. Your wife/husband isn't going to use a DNA air
| sniffer to figure out if you were at the strippers.
| They'll just follow you from a few car lengths back, or
| ask one of your friends, etc.
|
| And if your concern is government, there are way easier,
| scalable, way more accurate ways to invade your privacy
| that are already proven to work and have the
| infrastructure already setup.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >...way easier, scalable, way more accurate ways to
| invade your privacy that are already proven to work...
|
| That aren't detectable? That you can't easily take
| precautions against?
|
| If sequencing were cheap then it would be a hidden way to
| check who was at a venue - better than gait (or other
| biometric) analysis from video.
|
| For some uses this seems like a revolutionary monitoring
| technique.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _That aren 't detectable?_
|
| Of course. How do you detect or protect against when the
| FBI/NSA/three-letter-agency has a warrant for your
| cellphone (or Google, car, local coffee shop cameras,
| Ring cameras, credit card, etc.) information alongside a
| gag order?
|
| How often do you check your cars undercarriage for GPS
| monitors?
|
| Do you know how many times your car has been imaged by a
| license plate camera recently?
|
| Again, I'm not saying that this technology is _useless_.
| It 's just a lot worse, on several dimensions, than
| technology that is already invading your privacy this
| second.
|
| If this technology was seriously beginning to be used to
| track people, a handful of people can thwart it by
| carrying around an air filter and shaking it every now
| and again.
| amelius wrote:
| Until you realize that it is a cookie that you can't
| delete ...
| coderatlarge wrote:
| yes extremely low probability doesn't seem to have
| stopped law enforcement from pursuing wild goose chases
| that ensnare innocents.
|
| still the value of ambient dna statistics seems worth at
| least some risk.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Not just that. I touch a door knob and shed some skin
| cells. You touch the door knob and pick up some of my
| skin cells. You touch another door knob I've never seen
| and leave my DNA there.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| There's always that subset of people (Magicians, crooks,
| hackers, the terminally curious, etc) who will always do
| the ridiculous thing nobody thinks anybody would bother
| doing ;)
| throw83988494 wrote:
| Some countries have very strict rules!
|
| For example in France, doing DNA sequencing without consent
| of all parties, is crimimal offense with up to one year in
| prison! Similar in Germany.
|
| Those laws are designed to prevent paternity tests, but can
| be appplied very broadly!
| amelius wrote:
| Photos can be faked.
|
| Yet we still fear face recognition based surveillance.
| qualeed wrote:
| When the wind blows, a photo doesn't get faked, but these
| particulates will move to areas you haven't been to.
|
| Faking a photo, convincingly enough to pass forensic
| scrutiny, requires skill, time, and equipment. Faking the
| results of this DNA vacuuming requires no skill,
| significantly less time, and the only equipment is an air
| filter.
|
| I can go on, but I have a sneaking suspicion you're just
| trying to be contrarian rather than actually care about
| privacy.
| geysersam wrote:
| The danger depends a lot on the details of the technology.
| You're assuming the results would be noisy enough that
| they're more or less useless. But what if they're not that
| noisy? Maybe it's easy to distinguish if a person passed near
| the filter or >100 meters away based on the intensity of the
| collected signal? Maybe you can even approximately
| distinguish the age of the DNA. Suddenly that sounds quite
| useful for tracking and for use in courts
| qualeed wrote:
| Noise is not the only thing I mention, it's just one of
| many reasons. The fact that it is so easily gamed by bad
| actors is another compelling reason why it wouldn't work in
| the courts and is a poor tracking technique.
|
| Primarily though, there are more accurate ways of tracking
| people _at this very moment_ , which are less prone to
| false positives, less prone to faking, cheaper, more easily
| scalable, and are _already widely used and accepted in
| courts_.
|
| This offers basically no improvement over any existing
| tracking technology, with a handful of downsides that the
| others don't suffer from.
|
| While I think it's good to ask these sorts of questions,
| they need to be asked within the context of what is
| _already happening_. If there wasn 't cameras everywhere,
| ubiquitous and accurate phone tracking, internet connected
| cars, GPS trackers the size of a thumbnail, etc. then yes,
| this technology would be concerning. But that's not
| reality.
|
| Privacy advocates are already looked at with a sideways
| glance. The least we can do is be responsible on when we
| raise the alarm. This is not one of those times.
| geysersam wrote:
| The other techniques you mentioned also suffer from
| _some_ drawbacks. Cameras are relatively easy to avoid if
| you don 't want to be recognized. Phone tracking is not
| very effective if the target is security minded and
| you're not a state actor. And I want to reiterate that
| you don't know how prone this new technology is to false
| positives, you don't know how cheap it can be made. Just
| to illustrate, instead of figuring out how to put
| concealed cameras in the entries of a building, could it
| be enough to place a small device near the ventilation
| exhaust fan?
| currymj wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Life is too short. There is a narrow window in life, if any,
| when you will probably care about this.
|
| As a child, you won't care.
|
| As an elderly person on their way out, you also won't really
| care.
|
| Years 20 to 30, you probably don't have anything significant to
| lose.
|
| 50-75, you're probably more focused on being setup for
| comfortable retirement.
|
| That leaves people in their 30s and 40s, midlife crisis era,
| you probably have other things on your mind. Kids, hobbies,
| etc.
|
| If life was may two or three times longer, you might care more
| since the negative consequences of people sucking DNA out of
| thin air might affect you for a longer duration, but it isn't.
| You get maybe 75 good years and that's it. Don't worry about
| it.
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| Flock Safety but for DNA is inevitable.
| jl6 wrote:
| Health insurance companies could sequence every random bit of
| DNA in a given area, and then raise premiums in zip codes with
| higher than average rates of congenital disease. Of course,
| that would be totally unethical and illegal, so they'd just buy
| a set of risk data from a reputable company that worked out
| their risk scores somehow (how? Who knows? Best not to ask).
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Totally impractical too. The entire point if insurance from
| the company's point of view is to fine-tune the policy and
| pick and choose at the level of individuals. How many
| cigarettes you smoke and your mean blood glucose level way
| more actionable.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| This sounds like a fun exercise of signal to noise ratio
| tekla wrote:
| We used to call them Hoovers 25 years ago. Just call them that
| again
| strangattractor wrote:
| The Farnsworth Smell-O-Scope was based on this technology;)
| arjie wrote:
| I suppose you could try and see where I've been since I have my
| sequence publicly stored here https://my.pgp-
| hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC
|
| If nothing else, I'll serve as a cautionary tale against this if
| something happens to me as a result of having my DNA publicly
| available to all.
| xyproto wrote:
| I guess nothing will happen to you, but it's a bit like being
| naked on the internet?
| ysofunny wrote:
| a person is not their DNA
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| pictures of a person's private bits are more closely linked
| to their identity (or self-concept) than DNA?
|
| One is alterable, the other isn't ..
| thfuran wrote:
| More closely linked to their phenotype at any rate. And
| though DNA is in fact alterable, that's pretty
| irrelevant, culturally speaking.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Oops should have said raw, uncompiled, bits
|
| I agree DNA isn't that culturally relevant to an identity
| but that just seems to be due to anti-intellectualism
|
| Separate from the idea that the easier to alter something
| is, the more it should considered as a healthy part of
| identity..
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| How much did getting your DNA sequenced cost?
| robwwilliams wrote:
| What is somewhat amusing to me is that any one who has ever run
| PCRs for humans or low template DNA knows to do this with the
| utmost precaution for airborne DNA contamination. 35 to 45 cycles
| of 2x amplification for paleolithic sample.
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