New eugenics, genomics and human big data A perspective on the marketing and the use of genes in society

Contemporary genomics includes a broad spectrum of science-based commercial services, directed at the public. Several companies offer Direct-To-Consumer health and ancestry tests, based on genomic traits that can be used to group individuals in ethnic, social, or medical categories. The so-called "Big Data" are the core of these effort of classification of humans. The Big Data approach - because of algorithmic and selection biases - suffers several shortcomings, so that many doubts arise on the methods used to assign individuals to a group. Racial classification and identity is an example of how this approach is progressively expanding towards areas where inclusion/exclusion criteria were traditionally defined by social and political collective practices. In historical perspective, the new eugenics bears some similarities with the old one, though old-fashioned biopolitics is now replaced by a science-based marketing approach, triggering new bioethical concerns