Well, as a non-criminal thinking about it for a few seconds, various types of blackmail come to mind:
- you are the biological parent of this person who's looking for you, and if you want to stay anonymous…
- your husband isn't the father of his children, and if you don't want him to find out… (follow-up: both parents know but don't want the kids to.)
- you've been living under someone else's identity or a fake name…
- your ancestor was a slave-owner or Nazi or something and if you don't want the people you care about to know…
- your sibling isn't actually a blood relative, and so now the inheritance is in question…
These are all probably extremely rare cases, and were likely already known before or immediately after the test, but it's cheap to spam out the emails to see who's still trying to hide it. In a large enough population, it's still a worthwhile criminal enterprise. And their rarity makes them all the more vulnerable to blackmail. Where before it would have taken real legwork to find them, now it's just some data processing and emailing.
A similar concept is like those annoying ads for semi-legal websites where you can look up someone's criminal history, there could be a similar thing to look up someone's biological records. There might be a dating app in there too: filter for infertility or rare diseases?
There are plenty of other things, from the mundane to the exotic:
- having your medical care made more expensive or being denied insurance.
- being wrongly accused (and even convicted) because crime scene DNA was close to yours or a relative's.
- hiring based on genetic factors as in Gattaca.
- individually targeted attacks like the peach allergy from Parasite.
And again, that's off the top of my head; criminals are much more creative.
The key point that makes DNA (and other biometrics) even worse of a breach than credit cards or bank statements is it cannot be "reset."
- you are the biological parent of this person who's looking for you, and if you want to stay anonymous…
- your husband isn't the father of his children, and if you don't want him to find out… (follow-up: both parents know but don't want the kids to.)
- you've been living under someone else's identity or a fake name…
- your ancestor was a slave-owner or Nazi or something and if you don't want the people you care about to know…
- your sibling isn't actually a blood relative, and so now the inheritance is in question…
These are all probably extremely rare cases, and were likely already known before or immediately after the test, but it's cheap to spam out the emails to see who's still trying to hide it. In a large enough population, it's still a worthwhile criminal enterprise. And their rarity makes them all the more vulnerable to blackmail. Where before it would have taken real legwork to find them, now it's just some data processing and emailing.
A similar concept is like those annoying ads for semi-legal websites where you can look up someone's criminal history, there could be a similar thing to look up someone's biological records. There might be a dating app in there too: filter for infertility or rare diseases?
There are plenty of other things, from the mundane to the exotic:
- having your medical care made more expensive or being denied insurance.
- being wrongly accused (and even convicted) because crime scene DNA was close to yours or a relative's.
- hiring based on genetic factors as in Gattaca.
- individually targeted attacks like the peach allergy from Parasite.
And again, that's off the top of my head; criminals are much more creative.
The key point that makes DNA (and other biometrics) even worse of a breach than credit cards or bank statements is it cannot be "reset."