(06-01-2023, 12:05 AM)Freija Wrote: I'm with your sisters. No way would I freely hand out this information to be in some big database that I'm sure law enforcement and shady government types can access, not that I have anything to hide nor would I want to find out I have some dreaded genetic condition or something like that.
Call me paranoid, I don't care. Heck, I have never even ever been fingerprinted.
What I would like to know though is if you found out your grandma and grandpa were first cousins? That would explain a lot!
(just joshin' with you, bud!)
That's fine. Different folks are scared of different things. For me it's spiders, for other folks it's finding relatives, I reckon. I've never understood the fear of governments getting your DNA - what are they gonna do? Clone an army of you? But in any event, they'll get it if they want it, no donations on your part required. There's recently been a ruckus about the discovery that people's DNA can be retrieved from the air or water around them. We shed DNA with every step we take. If they just follow you around long enough to retrieve your soft drink can or cup from a public trash can, they've got a gold mine of your DNA right there.
It might be that the fingerprinting thing primed and desenstized me. I was fingerprinted every single year for years, at the same time I went through yearly firearms retraining and license renewals for work, so it was no biggie to me.
The first cousins grandparent thing - there is actually a test you can run for that called "runs of homozygosity". I ran it on myself, and didn't find any close affinities, despite the fact that I've been told my family tree looks more like a telephone pole than a tree!
One thing that worries a lot of folks is the uncertainty of unexpected discoveries, like finding out their dad wasn't their dad, or that they have unknown siblings or unknown kids of their own. I reckon that's a real fear for some folks. Shortly after I had mine tested, I was contacted by some gal in Germany who claimed she was related to me like a daughter, and couldn't understand how... but neither could I. Unfortunately, her data and account was deleted from the service's site, and I've never been able to find her again.
Shit happens, and some time you just can't explain it!
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