The beginning of genetic exhibitionism?

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is gaining popularity. However, the sensitive nature of personal genomic sequencing results might not be fully understood by the general public. In this paper we study the examples of disclosure of this sensitive information on social networks. We found that Twitter users often post their results publicly. We observed that information on ethnic background is much more frequently released than other information, for example relating to disease risk. This data could be of potential value to entities such as insurance companies. We found that about 24% of the analyzed tweets that mentioned ethnicity results also contained percentage data. In cases of users disclosing more details of their ethnic background, we found about 96% of these profiles also included identifying information and consequently can be attributed to individuals. As a result, external entities such as insurance companies can gain an insight in the genetic test results and in the end the users could be subject to genetic discrimination.