Since its founding, the Personal Genome Project has only accepted participants who understand and acknowledge re-identification as a potential risk. This "open consent" approach arose from our argument that privacy may be over-promised and that re-identification is increasingly possible as technology advances.
Dramatic progress in re-identification has been published today in Science (Gymrek et al.), and is reported on in Wired ("Scientists Discover How to Identify People From ‘Anonymous’ Genomes"). Wired's article features some quotes from George Church and highlights our project.