Comment by yannyu

I agree with you in principle. And I agree that the government has been steadily eroding our privacy. And I agree that California probably shouldn't be retaining these samples forever.

However, the likelihood of being able to "sequence" the biomatter on a blood spot is quite low, and the probability of getting good signal out of it continues to go down over time. It'll still remain useful for various kinds of spot testing and genetic disease testing, but it's not going to produce a fully validated genomic sequence or even be that useful for forensic purposes.

This isn't some sort of sealed blood vial, it's literally just blood on paper.

I agree but the State has already the monopoly on violence, which is something that only the State has. If they have a warrant, they can also break into your private property and you have to accept it. This is not too dissimilar.

They can arrest you (with a warrant) and take your DNA whenever they want so I don't see what your point is.

At least they can't trawl them for random matches when they're like that, the cost of sequencing is a barrier. Probably even more in that a 20 year old blood spot on a piece of paper isn't an ideal DNA sample.

It's about as accurate a Buzzfeed headline, but I guess that's par for the course on the internet these days.

It's not a "DNA sample" in the way that most people would consider it these days, no more than a used cup would also be called a "DNA sample". But to your point, it can still be used for surveillance and tracking.

Also, your phrasing is designed to make it seem like a huge overreach, when this act has likely saved millions of lives through early diagnosis of preventable diseases and early intervention on disabilities. I have personally experienced this.

So yes, I do think your framing here is inaccurate through omission of key facts.

the implication was misleading, yes. the implication being that California has database of its citizens' genetic data. when the reality is that CA has a _physical sample_ of blood.

It's very inaccurate.

OP made it sound like Cali was genome sequencing everyone born in the state and then storing that.

What's really going on is they're doing routine blood tests.

So yeah, pretty inaccurate.

it was misinformation, the DNA in such a sample is not only miniscule and unstandardized, but also not treated for longterm archival specimen retention.

the blood "spot" is about general morphology, and antigenic specificity.

It is as accurate as any of the incendiary Pravda propaganda pieces[1] about how the capitalist swine lived. Other posters have helpfully pointed out the specifics of why your particular spin on it is not entirely honest.

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[1] Often mostly factually accurate, but I doubt you'd find much common ground with the particular spin they'd put on describing your daily life.

Because the US has laughably weak privacy laws and most Americans snicker at the EU GDPR because of "cookie banners" (which btw isn't a thing - most consent dialogs are non-compliant as they shouldn't serve to just inform you but to actually obtain voluntary, revokable and specific informed consent) instead of thinking about what it means to actually have a fundamental human right to privacy and ownership of your own data or not.

They keep the samples for the same reason US tech startups keep deleted data and track seemingly useless behavior. Because they might find a use for it someday and there's literally no law preventing them from doing it.