Even as a big privacy advocate, I don't see much reason to be especially concerned.
The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking.
Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do.
There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could.
It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.
>Fingerprints are still used in forensics, because the odds that it is forged are lower than an actual possibility that it is real.
>Same for DNA then.
There's a world of difference between cloning a fingerprint/planting DNA (in the traditional sense, like fluids), and this technology.
The air might carry the particulates to areas never traveled to. That... doesn't happen with fingerprints.
Walking around the city with an air filter than traveling to a different city could imply that thousands of people have gone to a city they never went to before. Not happening with fingerprints or traditional DNA.
The noise with this tech is way too high to be useful in privacy-damaging ways. It's useless for tracking, useless for court, and more easily game-able than any other biometric by a lot.
To put it in your terms, this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
> this wont be used in forensics because the odds that it is a false positive is higher than the possibility that it is real.
It might see use in forensics to generate leads when investigating something. But agreed that on the whole it doesn't make much sense when compared to cameras and cell phones.
My point isn't that this isn't a biometric or something.
My point is that it is the weakest biometric, full of noise, constantly contaminated, easily forged with no skill set or technology required, with a very high false-positive rate when used for anything privacy-related.
There are so many more things (technology, policy, etc.), literally violating people's right to privacy at this very moment, that trying to spin this as a theoretically privacy-damaging technology strikes me as a bit ridiculous.
Cameras, license plate readers, air tags, phones, literally just stalking someone, and that sort of thing is great for tracking people.
They are easier, vastly less prone to false positives, etc. Your wife/husband isn't going to use a DNA air sniffer to figure out if you were at the strippers. They'll just follow you from a few car lengths back, or ask one of your friends, etc.
And if your concern is government, there are way easier, scalable, way more accurate ways to invade your privacy that are already proven to work and have the infrastructure already setup.
Not to mention that if you are innocent, and the government wants to fuck with you in particular, they won't need to go through this dog and pony show to do so.
They'll just send a half-dozen masked men to disappear you and then say to anyone that asks that you were an illegal immigrant with an unpaid parking ticket from 2005.
All of this stuff only matters if they are stupid enough to ever let you see the inside of a courtroom. And if you do, you're free to raise the obvious, believable defense that this is the flimsiest, most circumstantial of evidence imaginable. If that's the best evidence they have, you should ask for a bench trial, no judge with an above-room temperature IQ will convict you.
Of course. How do you detect or protect against when the FBI/NSA/three-letter-agency has a warrant for your cellphone (or Google, car, local coffee shop cameras, Ring cameras, credit card, etc.) information alongside a gag order?
How often do you check your cars undercarriage for GPS monitors?
Do you know how many times your car has been imaged by a license plate camera recently?
Again, I'm not saying that this technology is useless. It's just a lot worse, on several dimensions, than technology that is already invading your privacy this second.
If this technology was seriously beginning to be used to track people, a handful of people can thwart it by carrying around an air filter and shaking it every now and again.
Not just that. I touch a door knob and shed some skin cells. You touch the door knob and pick up some of my skin cells. You touch another door knob I’ve never seen and leave my DNA there.
There's always that subset of people (Magicians, crooks, hackers, the terminally curious, etc) who will always do the ridiculous thing nobody thinks anybody would bother doing ;)
I am also not so worried about it being used as evidence in a court conviction, but what if it is just used to continuously monitor public spaces? In that case the amount of data can filter out the noise, especially if you monitor a large area and can correlate samples over time.
We should not necessarily worry about this being used as concrete evidence in court, but about it being an automated way of generating suspicion. I could totally see how such technology could be used to identify people who the police could focus on.
On the other hand, CCTV is probably just as efficient for that, so perhaps this technology won't make it worse.
The danger depends a lot on the details of the technology. You're assuming the results would be noisy enough that they're more or less useless. But what if they're not that noisy? Maybe it's easy to distinguish if a person passed near the filter or >100 meters away based on the intensity of the collected signal? Maybe you can even approximately distinguish the age of the DNA. Suddenly that sounds quite useful for tracking and for use in courts
Noise is not the only thing I mention, it's just one of many reasons. The fact that it is so easily gamed by bad actors is another compelling reason why it wouldn't work in the courts and is a poor tracking technique.
Primarily though, there are more accurate ways of tracking people at this very moment, which are less prone to false positives, less prone to faking, cheaper, more easily scalable, and are already widely used and accepted in courts.
This offers basically no improvement over any existing tracking technology, with a handful of downsides that the others don't suffer from.
While I think it's good to ask these sorts of questions, they need to be asked within the context of what is already happening. If there wasn't cameras everywhere, ubiquitous and accurate phone tracking, internet connected cars, GPS trackers the size of a thumbnail, etc. then yes, this technology would be concerning. But that's not reality.
Privacy advocates are already looked at with a sideways glance. The least we can do is be responsible on when we raise the alarm. This is not one of those times.
The other techniques you mentioned also suffer from some drawbacks. Cameras are relatively easy to avoid if you don't want to be recognized. Phone tracking is not very effective if the target is security minded and you're not a state actor. And I want to reiterate that you don't know how prone this new technology is to false positives, you don't know how cheap it can be made. Just to illustrate, instead of figuring out how to put concealed cameras in the entries of a building, could it be enough to place a small device near the ventilation exhaust fan?
>The other techniques you mentioned also suffer from some drawbacks.
Of course, which is why I never implied that they don't have drawbacks. Just that the drawbacks of this method, in the context of privacy and tracking, are much more numerous.
>And I want to reiterate that you don't know how prone this new technology is to false positives, you don't know how cheap it can be made.
I don't know how cheap it will be, that's true (it's probably more expensive, in time and money, than an air tag or pin camera). But it is pretty easy to figure out that this will have more false positives than every other current tracking method. Give me an air filter and 30 minutes to walk through a store, and I can make it look like dozens of people were in places they never were. That's not an issue with any other method, especially considering the effort to produce false positives by a bad actor is ~0.
>Just to illustrate, instead of figuring out how to put concealed cameras in the entries of a building, could it be enough to place a small device near the ventilation exhaust fan?
Even if we ignore the false positives and difference in cost, this wouldn't let you pinpoint timing, any other information about the person that might be valuable (who else was with the person, what they were wearing, etc.), has a risk of contamination, doesn't have the ability to give real-time results, no option of capturing audio... Probably several other downsides I'm not thinking of immediately.
Again, I'm not saying that this technology is completely useless. Just that, compared to all of the technology already invading your privacy, this technology is a large step backwards in practically every privacy-related metric.
Raising a fuss about stuff like this is how ordinary people get fatigued by "privacy nuts" and stop caring about the dozens of technologies and policies which are significantly worse, which are already invading our privacy.
When the wind blows, a photo doesn't get faked, but these particulates will move to areas you haven't been to.
Faking a photo, convincingly enough to pass forensic scrutiny, requires skill, time, and equipment. Faking the results of this DNA vacuuming requires no skill, significantly less time, and the only equipment is an air filter.
I can go on, but I have a sneaking suspicion you're just trying to be contrarian rather than actually care about privacy.
The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking.
Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do.
There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could.
It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.