Kevin Fogarty reports:
It may now be possible for anyone, even if they follow rigorous privacy and anonymity practices, to be identified by DNA data from people they do not even know.
A paper published in January in the journal Science describes a process by which it’s possible to identify by name the donors of DNA samples, even without any demographic or personal information. The technique was developed by a team of geneticists at MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and is intended to demonstrate that science and technology have surpassed the techniques and laws currently in place for safeguarding private medical data, according to Yaniv Erlich, a fellow at Whitehead and member of the research team.
Read more on IDG News/Computerworld. The headline is misleading as there’s no hacking involved at all.