But FamilyTreeDNA has granted police permission to upload data from crime scene DNA and search the company’s more than 1 million records to look for relatives of potential suspects. While some people support the company’s effort to help catch suspected rapists and murderers, privacy advocates and some customers of DNA testing services are alarmed by the idea that police could poke around in people’s genetic data. Here’s what the announcement really means.
What genetic information can law enforcement access?
Police are interested in determining how much DNA people in the database share with genetic samples from crime scenes. Genealogists can then use the closest matches possible to build family trees and identify a likely suspect.
The process is similar to looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile to see who is in the person’s social network, says Melinde Lutz Byrne, a forensic genealogist at Boston University who is involved in helping law enforcement solve rape and murder cases.
FamilyTreeDNA’s Gene-by-Gene laboratory has “processed a handful of cold cases for the FBI,” company president and founder Bennett Greenspan said in a letter emailed to customers on February 3. Those FBI investigations are being conducted on behalf of other law enforcement agencies to find suspects in violent crimes and to identify remains of deceased people.
But that doesn’t mean law enforcement has unfettered access to customers’ DNA. Police can see data only from people in FamilyTreeDNA’s database who are a genetic match with those crime scene samples. Law enforcement “cannot search or ‘dig through’ FTDNA profiles any more than an ordinary user can.” For any additional information, police would need a warrant or subpoena, the letter said.
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that shyt is also gross too.
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Well get a load of that
