Colorado's Jason Crow is a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
The lawmaker made his feelings clear during an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, where he warned that bioweapons, created to target specific people on a battlefield, are on the horizon.
Guess what people will do when they spit into a cup and send it to 23andMe? The lawmaker claimed that their genetic material was owned by a private company. With very little intellectual property protection or privacy protection, it can be sold off.
The ethics of genetic data have had a long and muddy past, and the modern legal system has struggled to keep up.
While Crow didn't offer a lot of evidence for his statements, genetic profilers like the ones he called out have made headlines for alleged data abuses in the past. Several of these organizations exploded in popularity before any legal precedent or social norm for the use of such data were established, and some extremely questionable behavior followed suit.
Even if you don't choose to participate, your relatives might, which can have some pretty revealing consequences for just about anyone in the family tree.
The lawmaker's claims are cause to more deeply examine our relationship to our most personal data, which is already perhaps too easy.
"You can't have a discussion about this without talking about privacy and the protection of commercial data because expectations of privacy have degraded over the last 20 years," said the rep. The polling shows that young people have little expectation of privacy.
Crow's comments are quite unnerving. Even though there's only so much we can do, data protection is always something that deserves our attention. We want you to read the fine print.
Two U.S. lawmakers say that biological weapons could be used.
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