IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information, then I feel like people having a DNA test at birth or on becoming a citizen could be useful, both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia") and from a policing standpoint ("we found DNA on this woman's clothes and immediately matched it to this man who hasn't committed a crime before" or "we were able to identify this john doe because their DNA was on record"). However, given that companies and governments are awful, I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/

I don't think it could ever actually work in practice :/

Exactly. I can think of so many bad outcomes. Just the medical point:

both medically ("your sample indicates you may have a higher risk of dementia")

You know how this will end in the modern tech dystopia. In countries where health care insurance is not mandatory or there is a large gap between collectivized and private insurance, DNA would be used to reject or raise the prices for people with 'unlucky DNA'.

A government that could be trusted now is not necessarily trustable in the future. I am pretty sure the orange guy clan would love to lone their pockets by selling such information.

Also, apart from these issues, a lot of people simply do not want to know these things. Suppose that the outcome is "you have a 30% risk of dementia by 60". For most people such kind of information is hard to act on, while it increases worry significantly. I do think it can help for some treatable illnesses, enabling early monitoring.

> IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information

How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?

When I was a kid, I recall police coming to our classrooms to fingerprint us. The whole school got fingerprinted. The idea was to help police if kids went missing.

Whether or not you believe that justification ("Stranger Danger" was a scare at the time), I can promise you those fingerprints were used to put people in jail later.

Indeed. It’s essentially the age-old conundrum: I don’t need to worry about my privacy because I’m not breaking the rules… until someone changes the rules.

On the downside, millions wrongly killed, imprisoned, fined, families torn apart.

On the upside, think how good that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA article will be.

Why has to be the government if anything could be done by health providers and be guarded by the existing privacy laws that don’t allow the government to indiscriminately access it

How close does a DNA "match" have to be to get somebody tossed in jail? Do they actually require 100%, or is a "match" something less? What's the false-positive rate? Would a non-twin sibling's DNA "match"?

Yes, I'm aware that, in theory, DNA is unique. As is the theory for finger-prints. But, I'm also aware that theory is rarely reality.

Perfect enforcement of crimes is a bad thing. If criminal law was perfectly enforced we'd still be in Prohibition and PGP would also be illegal.

Your argument boils down to "if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we could do this", so I'm not sure what the point of it is.

(Entertainingly, if people were 100% just, fair, and good, we wouldn't need this database... or police or militaries for that matter.)

At any rate, even if I could ensure, in perpetuity, that my DNA would not be used inappropriately (where I get to decide what that means), I would still not want it collected and database'd. People deserve to have privacy in their bodies.

Life in general would be a lot simpler and nicer in a perfect world with perfect (whatever it means) people in it

There are several European countries that do this from what I understand