Tim Cook:

Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content…We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance.

I don’t think Tim Cook was thinking about it, but the combination of genetic or medical data with our “enduring digital profile” is even more scary. While many of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies have taken great care in crafting their privacy policies, data breaches or a change in a company’s governance/business model could create significant harm.

As more of our lives are captured and stored digitally, we need to think carefully about not only the implications of that digital data itself but also what it means when linked to genetic or digital medical data.