The relative match can happen whether you have submitted your DNA or not.
The third party that is searching using DNA gets "Bill's close relative" or "Bill's close relative that also anonymously submitted their DNA to the database".
The specter of the service working internally to de-anonymize submissions is real enough though.
I guess I don't really care about protecting myself from future dystopias, not really in a sense that I have nothing to hide (I find attention quite uncomfortable), more in a sense that I hope I'd stand up and shout loudly, rendering irrelevant all the past hiding-planning.
There's approximately 100,000 Amsterdam Jews that would stand with you and should just as loudly, only they can't.
Lessons from the past can only be applied to the future if you're actually willing to learn them. Unfortunately, it seems as though those lessons weren't serious enough yet. I shudder to think of the kind of lesson that it would take to get people to understand these things in a way that we will actually live by those lessons in the future.
Standing and shouting loudly is not much of a defense against an organized entity that is 'out to get you', even if that seems like a distant and remote possibility, the damage it could do is sufficient to warrant the - small - premium we'd pay in being careful with our data today.
It's a bit like the rest of the security industry: probability of incidence * potential damage is a good way to figure out whether or not something is worth protecting against.
Because I got very tired of the 'if you have nothing to hide' mantra, and even if you freely admit to finding attention quite uncomfortable you might be persuaded by the argument that seemingly innocent entries in databases have cost many lives already.
Is it okay if I think the better lesson (vs hiding) is to not allow tyranny?
Maybe it's overly optimistic or foolish or something, but it's still a shit world if only the people that (properly!) planned ahead survive.
Edit: Imagine a modern populist horror that subjected everyone to mandatory genetic testing and slaughtered people with certain genes; You can't escape your genes, the problem would be the populist horror, not whether you were on some preexisting list of people that needed slaughterin'.
That's definitely preferable. But given that Hitler actually made it in on the democratic process you don't always get that choice. And yes, those that properly planned ahead survived. I have a very nice piece about that from a guy called Simon Carmiggelt, unfortunately it is available in Dutch only, and only in video (even though he was a writer):
The essence is that the writer meets with an elderly lady from the city on the street and she relates how just above everybody died from a particular family, except for one guy who saw it coming, warned everybody else and then left.
If the Nazi's had been able to take possession of a Europe wide DNA database they might have just been able to eradicate the Jewish people forever and that's a very sobering thought to me. Now, I'm not Jewish but I know a few people here that are 'singletons', they have no living relatives going back two generations and that's a pretty strange thing to have it described to you. I don't have much to worry about from the angle of religious persecution or anything to that effect (I believe, but then again, who knows, maybe one day some religious nutcase will decide to open a war on atheism and maybe then I will have a problem but that's not genetic so the link with DNA isn't really there).
Even so, less data in searchable files about you is better imnsho, the upsides are quite limited and the downsides significant, especially if you have no idea who is rooting around in them (one case of being stalked is enough for a lifetime).
If one has cheap DNA sequencing, then they don't really need a preexisting database to implement genocide. In fact relying on one could even reduce their accuracy.
Not that I disagree with the general lesson. It just seems in such a situation, a mapping of DNA<->name is actually less worse than a mapping of name<->location.
Going on the assumption that your name and address are already out there in many databases adding your DNA + your name would make it that much easier to go from 'DNA' to 'list of people to pick up'.
It's always the combination of databases that makes them that much more powerful.
I imagine I slipped in my edit as you were writing, but (given the necessary tech) the Nazis could have created a Europe wide database by collecting DNA.
Indeed. Imagine people being jailed, exiled or killed based on their deviance from some ideal. It's not at all imaginary to me that such a thing could re-occur in the future and there is absolutely no telling where it would happen either. But with lots of countries moving drastically towards extremism in Europe and elsewhere I see little to be optimistic about.
English translation of that piece from above:
[deleted]
It's super crummy (google translate) but it gives you a bit of a feeling of the atmosphere in the original. This is not fiction.
I'll do a better translation, this really does no justice to the original text.
edit: a much better translation, still a quickie but it captures the mood much better:
The third party that is searching using DNA gets "Bill's close relative" or "Bill's close relative that also anonymously submitted their DNA to the database".
The specter of the service working internally to de-anonymize submissions is real enough though.
I guess I don't really care about protecting myself from future dystopias, not really in a sense that I have nothing to hide (I find attention quite uncomfortable), more in a sense that I hope I'd stand up and shout loudly, rendering irrelevant all the past hiding-planning.