Bad Blood Bank

The American Red Cross could finance itself for decades by selling your DNA information.

This evil idea comes as a cautionary, evil notion.  The plan is sound.  The plan breaks no laws, but breaks the social conventions.

Consider that the American Red Cross (ARC)  now requires positive identification before donating blood.  There isn’t really any explanation outside “keeping the blood supply safe”.  Consider the reasons why the ARC might want to permanently keep a sample from every blood donation tagged with the positive identification.  For example, a “Really Nasty Syndrome”  could cause a national health epidemic severe enough to go through the records of all blood donors to track the spread of this disease and identify the carriers.  The American Red Cross could defend the practice of keeping the blood samples, and keeping the practice secret until such an epidemic.

Now as time goes on, more information about hereditary diseases can be gleaned from a DNA sample.  It will become profitable for an insurance company to use a DNA sample to gauge risks before insuring individuals.  If an insurance company found out about this freely given repository of DNA., it would happily make large donations to the Red Cross to access it.  Nothing illegal would take place.

Hopefully, this evil idea will never come to pass.