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But how should you feel if your DNA was used to locate a distant relative who did? The problem was finding a match.ĭNA profiles can be held indefinitely, and the data can be handed over to police who have warrants or subpoenas. The California police had the Golden State Killer’s DNA and recently found an unusually well-preserved sample from one of the crime scenes. and state law enforcement agencies have been cultivating growing databases of DNA not just from convicted criminals, but also in some cases from people accused of crimes. In the years since, scientists have developed powerful tools to identify people by tiny variations in their DNA, as individual as fingerprints. The police had linked him to more than 50 rapes and 12 murders from 1976 to 1986, and he had eluded all attempts to find him. The trail of the Golden State Killer had gone cold decades ago. No one has thought about what are the possible consequences.” “And then they do, once there is a Cambridge Analytica. “There is a whole generation that says, ‘I don’t really care about privacy,’” said Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of The Innocence Project, which uses DNA to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted. “He was a horrible man and it is good that he was identified, but does the end justify the means?”Ĭoming so quickly on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data on more than 70 million users was shared without their permission, it is beginning to dawn on consumers that even their most intimate digital data - their genetic profiles - may be passed around in ways they never intended.

“This is really tough,” said Malia Fullerton, an ethicist at the University of Washington who studies DNA forensics. Privacy and ethical issues glossed over in the public’s rush to embrace DNA databases are now glaringly apparent, they said. Most never imagined that one day intimate pieces of their DNA could be mined to assist police detectives in criminal cases.Įven as scientific experts applauded this week’s arrest of the Golden State Killer suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, some expressed unease on Friday at reports that detectives in California had used a public genealogy database to identify him. Genetic testing services have become enormously popular with people looking for long-lost relatives or clues to hereditary diseases.