In China (based on its Marxist roots) cults and religion are deemed to be damaging to a person and to mass popular culture ("Religion is the opium of the people" - Marx). China considers religion to be within the freedom of an individual to observe, but not to impose on another person: in China you can not be indoctrinated into a religion until you are 18 years of age.
Combine this with the wave of Islamic reevaluation on the Asian supercontinent - ISIS is and has been a huge problem in China, with mailbombing campaigns and other acts of widespread terrorism.
Repression is an opinion expressed in the op-ed that hasn't considered factors that are alien to the Western author's perspective.
It's a given in the sense you describe, but a rose, by any other name is still a rose.
I see no reason to not call it what it is on the tin, and this is exactly the danger that entrusting your genetic code to anyone presents. As a whole, our species is only as scrupled as the least scrupulous actor. Frankly, I'm not half as upset at China as I am the firms that have been compiling private databases of genetic material and then selling access to the data.
However NSA shoveling all unfiltered data to Israel is in general an insane policy not in line with general liberalism.
It's much more about the region (Xinjiang) and particular fundamentalists groups present there. This happens to demographically correlate with the Turkic people in China's Northwest.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/01/the-islamic-state-pledg...
The Chinese government doesn't really go for publicizing terrorist attacks. We could learn from them, in that regard.
I predict that in the near future, companies will offer more incentives to entice people into volunteering their DNA for various other perks.
Comments on HN became so politically engaged in the last two years, that it starts feeling like a Fourth International cell.
HN can't be immune from macro trends. We do what we can to contain them.
But I'm afraid the slightest boost in predictive power will matter to an organization of scale. And while it might be hard to tell if you should be a mathematician based on your DNA, it might be easier to tell risk factors about you or your relatives, which could cause an employer to see you as too expensive.
It's illegal to discriminate on disability, but if I know you're predisposed to heart disease and discriminate on similar basis, is that discrimination on disability if society doesn't classify it that way?
Also eventually judgments may be made on people which involve weights from thousands of data sources, only one of which will be DNA. It will be difficult to explain why any decision was made.
