[lisarea]

It's a very common and effective narrative technique to start out a story about a general or sort of abstract phenomenon by beginning the discussion with a concrete example. That's all that article is doing. They found a very specific example of someone's purchasing information being mined for markers of private medical information and resulting in a large corporation accurately predicting something that the person had not even revealed to her family yet; so it's a very effective attention-grabbing device. It's sort of like synecdoche, where a part or subset of a phenomenon is used to personalize and drive home the significance of the greater issue at hand.

The specific example they offered is not meant to convey the scope of the issue, but to illustrate at the outset of the article the sort of thing that is already happening as a result of these tactics.

I interpreted that story from the perspective of the girl who had her information exposed to her family without her consent, rather than from the father's, BTW.