So...<p>The weird thing about DNA and genes is that the data, should you have access to it in it&#x27;s original form, as samples of biological material, is never anonymous.<p>The techniques that effectively anonymize genetic information, typically render it as an unusable data set for practical purposes.<p>The only thing that makes DNA anonymous is constructing an unrelated set of hash keys as lookups, and then using these coded tokens as decoupled representational references to a remote system that mitigates requests. Even then, even without access to the direct data, the traits expressed <i>COULD</i> still accidentally identify certain members of the set very easily.<p>How many albinos are in the set? How many male albinos? How many male albinos with blood type O positive? Oh look, it&#x27;s Joe and it turns out he&#x27;s a carrier for this other embarrassing genotype. Whoops, secret&#x27;s out and everyone knows, and there&#x27;s no going back!<p>So phenotypes can still identify people inadvertently, and then provide opportunities for the enumeration of members, through process of elimination, inherently weakening what might become a theater of anonymity.<p>But more terrible still, is, let&#x27;s just say they give the raw genetic data up. Say you have a juicy tidbit of information you pulled from the collection of samples, and you think you know who it is. So you surreptitiously snag a hair follicle from them. It&#x27;s them all right, and you can prove it conclusively. Maybe your a nice guy and you won&#x27;t misuse this sort of advantage, but is that true for everyone at large, throughout society?<p>With DNA, genomes and genetic evidence, you kind of just have to keep saying to yourself &quot;<i>this is not anonymizable, it will never be anonymous, we cannot truly de-identify anyone&#x27;s DNA</i>&quot; and the sooner we come to terms with that, the better we&#x27;ll get at dealing with this sort of data.