Consumer genomics kits are all the rage. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, industry leader 23&Me sold 1.5 million. I can understand the appeal. For one, it’s fun to learn about where your ancestors came from and perhaps even pick up a surprising fact about your family heritage to share at cocktail parties. You might even discover a long-lost family member or two. More seriously, people want to find out which diseases they are more susceptible to and steps they can take to mitigate their risk. Setting aside concerns about the accuracy and reliability of these tests, we are still left with a major potential pitfall: the privacy and security threats of amassing large quantities of biometric data.
