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Story: Google accused of bio-piracy

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Whether or not genomic information is available for free or not is not the point - the important point is facilitating access to highly personal information without consent.

when you download a document from the internet (via google) you have the implied consent of the person who posted it to that public space that it is now for common use - this is enough because this is only data and nothing much more - it is not as personal as genomic information.

By contrast when you access somebody's genomic data you need to have explicit consent because this is something very personal that has an important bearing on their identity, health, personhood etc.

If google makes all personal genomic data available to anyone to use as they will it is also making that available to profit making enterprises to profit by and its not clear how they could put in place an adequate consent mechanism to do this. This data is not googles to redistribute (it shouldn't even be craig venters...)

Its also misleading to think that this data is going to be freely and equally available to everyone in common - only certain specialized knowledge enterprises have the ability rto make use of such data and by and large they are private, for profit and won't redistribute a penny back to the people whose genomic information they are using.

Genomic information is not like software code and its wrong to compare them - it belongs very personally to individuals - when you use that information without explicit consent there is a victim.

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