DNA Data, Security, and You

One day you’ll be handed an electronic copy of your sequenced genome on a flash drive, maybe a phone app. You’ll need to know how to keep it safe.We’re hurtling towards a future in which our DNA data will be cheaply generated and routinely summoned. Preparing for that, a UC Irvine team has created an app that can store a digital copy of a fully sequenced genome on a smartphone.

This Android app, GeneDroid, can spit out the results of a paternity test in under a second, Fierce Mobile Health Care reported recently. (You can download a version of that app, called Father Finder, from the Google Play store.) Say you were on a first date, Gene Tsudik, one of the app’s architects has explained, “You and the other person could hold up your phones, exchange tiny amounts of encrypted information and be able to determine how much common ancestry you have.

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