Hey everyone, welcome back to Bionic Bug podcast, episode 4. This is your host Natasha Bajema, fiction author, national security expert and "insecto-phobe".
First off, a personal update. I just finished my second draft of Project Gecko, Book Two of the Lara Kingsley Series. I’ll be sending it to my editor on May 1. I’m thrilled to finally reach this next step in my writer journey. If you’re a writer, you know the constant struggle against the voices in your head. Even though I’ve successfully published Bionic Bug, sometimes I worry about whether that was just a fluke. Well, I’ve about to prove to myself and you all that I can do it again.
I’m really excited about the story in Project Gecko which delves deeper into Lara’s backstory and follows her journey through her grief over the loss of her best friend Sully. Over the next few months, I’ll be rewriting the book several times to finalize the manuscript in August. I expect to release it on Kobo in September so stay tuned for further updates.
Let’s talk tech. The headline that caught my attention this week is a doozy. It’s from April 27 on CNN online: "Police used free genealogy database to track Golden State Killer suspect, investigator says.” Before I talk about this, I need to make a few points for context.
For the past decade, most of us have signed up for free gmail from Google (or other services) and interacted with Facebook and other social media for free. It’s important to understand that these services are not really “free” in practice. Yes, you don’t have to pay for them, but there are hidden costs. I can’t count the number of times I’ve downloaded an app or signed up for an online service where I simply clicked that little box, agreeing to accept the terms and conditions without even reading them.
I’ve peeked at the terms and conditions a few times and then quickly moved on. Let’s be honest… even if we read those agreements, they’re full of lawyer-speak, wordy, extremely long, and difficult to understand. That’s why we just click yes and move on. The terms are conditions are designed with that intention. Because if you did read through the terms and conditions and understand their meaning, you probably wouldn’t like everything you just signed up for and you might not sign up in the first place.
It’s important to understand that for many of these online services, YOU are the product. The company offers you free services because they are getting something from you. Something that is extremely valuable. That something is data about YOU. It’s time for us to become more cognizant of the data that we’re offering. At least when you’re aware of the costs and benefits, you can make the best decisions for yourself.
Every time I talk about emerging technologies, I poll the audience for the number of people who have sent their DNA samples to companies like 23&Me or AncestryDNA to find out more about their genetic background. Every time, there are at least a few hands. Then I ask them if they’ve read the terms and conditions. No one raises their hand. When you submit your DNA sample to these companies, you give them ownership of that sample. They can sell it to other companies. That’s your genome. You don’t have another genome. You can’t change your genome. It’s not like a credit card.
Let’s go back to the headline for today.
Police think they have caught the Golden State killer, believed to be responsible for killing 12 people and raping more than 50 women in the 1970s and 1980s. Police used the GEDmatch database to match DNA found at the crime scene. GEDmatch database is free to use and publicly accessible. In that sense, it’s not a paid service like 23andMe or AncestryDNA. People enter their own DNA profile they receive from these paid services to find other possible family members.
Police entered DNA thought to be from the killer into the database to locate potential matches and were able to identify relatives of the suspected killer.
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