Lobster, Privacy
I can’t remember the moment I first tasted lobster—or “lopsta”, as I learned the correct pronunciation while living back east—but I truly enjoy it. Broiled, fried, steamed, if it’s the real deal from the coast of New England, I’m there. Unfortunately, Maine lobster is $30-$50 per pound in restaurants. (The Palm Restaurant, famous for steaks and lobsters, is reportedly currently charging $75 for a 3-pound Nova Scotian—not Maine—lobster.) Needless to say it’s been a long, long time since I had dinner, much less order lobster at the Palm; it’s simply too pricey for most of us. As an alternative to dining out, there are deals on the internet where you can order live lobsters, at a much lower price, and get them shipped to your home. But then you have more issues.
I recall a New Years Eve get-together twenty years ago where everyone knew lobster was one of the food items for our celebration. I ordered live lobsters from Maine, shipped to our home in Connecticut. Once the carton was opened, the enthusiasm of friends and family quickly waned; they didn’t even wish to look at the living creatures. Comments were swift in coming. “You’re really going to kill them? I can’t eat him, her, them.” As for me, I looked the lobsters in the eyes, and carefully explained about the pot, the steam, butter, sauce, and their expected place on the table. In reality, lobsters seem to lose interest when they understood that they’re not ‘coming to dinner’, but rather ‘were to become dinner’. As I couldn’t send them back, I persevered and cooked them. No one else ate the lobster that evening.
From a physiological standpoint, whether lobster or fried chicken, everything we intake (eat), travels along our internal highway, on its way to an eventual “outflow”. All of this brings me to something I recently read.
It appears that lobsters (and other menu items) may need to get dressed up so that they can smile for the camera during digestion. In an article titled “FDA Approves First Digital Ingestion Tracking System Med”, the Associated Press reported that the Food and Drug Administration “has approved the first drug in the United States with a digital ingestion tracking system.” That’s right. Swallow this little pill and not only may it make you feel better or cure what ails you, but in theory your doctor or primary care provider will be able to determine the exact location of that pill. I am not making this up. The pill, or as it’s referred to by the drugmakers—the “digitally enhanced medication”—sends a message to a sensor on a wearable patch somewhere on your body. At first glance some might shrug and say, “so what, big deal.” However, given what the Russians have been doing for the past few years, it’s entirely likely that the Kremlin will be able to track my lobster dinner as it travels through me. Let’s be honest. It might also be tracked by the FBI, the NSA, or the CIA (the CIA in Langley, Virginia, not the CIA cooking schools in Hyde Park, New York, or St. Helena, California). If the Russians, or anyone else got hold of Hillary’s emails, it would seem like a small task to read the information traveling through me and stored on a patch.
I’m one of those people who’s been reluctant to send my saliva (and $60-$100 or more) to companies like 23 And Me to have my DNA analyzed. I’ve long maintained that I am part-English and part-German, based on my mother’s description (with her emphasis on “English”). Besides, I’m just not that curious about my exact makeup, due to a couple of factors. First, I don’t care if the analysis shows me to be 30% English, 16% German, 21% French, 13% Martian, and 20% cheddar cheese (although my friends believe this last one is quite probable). The prospect of my DNA being analyzed, and subsequently used to evaluate, compare, contrast, and categorize me and other people into very specific groups is not compelling to me either. More to the point, it’s my belief that these DNA-companies will in all likelihood sell and resell my DNA information to other companies or worse.
Two billion (that’s ‘B’: billion) people, 27% of the planet use Facebook each month. And if we haven’t yet learned about Facebook’s business structure, it’s high time we did. Simply put, the more information we put on Facebook the more clicks are generated on Facebook as our friends, family, and our social and business connections check in with us. And every click, each and every piece of data, is stored in Facebook’s database, forever. You, too, add to the clicks as you check out the pages of friends, family, total strangers, and cats. Here’s a simple example. That cat video you just watched is another click captured by Facebook. While you enjoy the cat, Facebook is capturing your viewing as data to be sold and resold to advertisers, marketers, and “interested parties”. It is no coincidence that once Facebook knows that you like cats you suddenly begin receiving offers for cat sand, cat food, cat toys, cat brushes, cat clippers, cat clothes, cat beds, cat medicines, and so on.
DNA contains the fundamental and distinctive characteristics of who we are. DNA testing services are, I believe, a variation of the Facebook model. So just what do I believe the DNA companies will do with our information? Sell it. And if they don’t sell it, someone will gain access to it. Some people don’t care if their information, including DNA, is sold and resold, and I’m fine with that. For me, if DNA companies want my DNA, they can pay me for it. Privacy should be close to sacred. But private data is not always secure. Ask Equifax. Between May and July, 2017, the Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses for up to 143 million Americans were hacked. Oops. Yet, consider this little 40 word section from one DNA company’s Privacy Statement:
“As our business continues to grow and change, we might restructure, buy, or sell subsidiaries or business units. In these transactions, customer information is often one of the transferred assets, remaining subject to promises made in then prevailing privacy statements.”
My interpretation of this could find the following chain of events: A corporation in the United States owns a DNA Company, collects a $99 fee, analyzes the DNA and sends you or me the results. They also retain the information. Forever. Twenty minutes or twenty years later, the corporation sells its DNA business to another corporation headquartered in, say, Tajikistan. The individual's DNA will be, according to the above quote, one of the transferred assets. The buyer (new owner) will now have access to all of the DNA information collected to that point. The primary languages in Tajikistan are Tajik and Russian. Who might tap into that DNA database?
