Anonymised genomes cannot be linked to faces as previously claimed

What your face looks like is determined almost entirely by the DNA you inherit. This has led to the claim that the millions of anonymised genomes shared for medical research could be linked to specific individuals via photos shared on social media – but the risk is very low, according to Rajagopal Venkatesaramani at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues. The researchers studied the genomic data and online photos of 126 individuals, then tried to match faces to genomes. They worked backwards from the faces, using AI to analyse the photos and predict gene variants, then looking for genomes with those predicted variants. Given a subset of just 10 individuals, the team was able to identify a quarter of them.