> From what I can tell this was a capability the USPS has had for a while, probably going back to the days of anthrax spores being sent to politicians. The USPS was probably directed to track where every piece of mail came from and image the outside of it.
I don’t think that’s accurate. They already had the scanning/imaging pipeline for routing and sorting. It wasn’t until later that they realized it’d be a good service to email the images to the recipients every morning – hence, Informed Delivery. It’s like a side-project that grew into a bonafide feature.
No. It goes back to the 1990s when we used Data Entry Operators to key mail details that could not be read by OCR. This is all so the mail goes into the truck sorted. That is the most important part of the mail delivery operation.
The fact that you can get pictures from this system is the innovation but imaging has existed for much longer than this product.
You'd think my ideal self-interest is for no one to volunteer for any research except my own relatives so that all medicine is optimized to my care. But that doesn't work that well. The genome itself is just not that useful. If you learn something from that VCF for a whole-genome sequence that's interesting, feel free to let me know.
I personally benefited from the aggregate that is the UK Biobank's repository of genome sequences and medical histories, and I'm grateful for everyone who contributed that for science. PGP is the closest I can get to providing my data apart from All Of Us which has a bit of medical data about me but no one has all my medical history.
I hope that, if nothing else, I am a piece in an instrument for humanity to comprehend the Universe. Either through my genome being useful when compiled with others or as a cautionary tale to making your genome available.
It is interesting that knowing your zipcode I might have predicted your response.
> I am a piece in an instrument for humanity to comprehend the Universe.
For a lot of people, if their data is being used as a benefit, then they should be properly compensated for that. They're more likely to be trying to comprehend how to keep food on the table.