Selling Ethics

Barnes et al. (2025) emphasize the need for current biobanking consent models to more deeply engage participants who want to determine how their data are used. Despite agreeing with the authors on wanting to make biobanking data more private and secure, we identify deep moral difficulties with their article on two levels. On one level, we worry that the authors have not engaged deeply enough with many of the central challenges debated in the AI literature. And on a different level, rather than critically examining the use of novel technological methods for managing biobanking data, the article instead comes across as the authors trying to market the underlying technology under the guise of an ethics paper.