As usual, we will probably have to wait until a lot of people start experiencing negative effects. Nobody cares until it hurs them personally.
Forensic DNA was developed 30 years ago when actual DNA sequencing was mostly a pipe dream (just short disease areas).
My question is what these newer methods are storing. Elsewhere in this threat someone mentioned that 23andme was able to inspect >100k SNPs, which would be outstanding data if they can produce it with an acceptable error rate.
> the chance of multiple matches can be less than the worlds population.
See, this is exactly what I was talking about: it depends on what question you are trying to answer. If have a sample from the scene of a crime, we can get very high confidence when matching that sample to even a large number of suspects. The "paradox" happens when you try to ask a different (but related) question that changes the search from one-to-many into many-to-many. Even with a low probability of a match, the larger number of possible matches makes false positives very common.
(if you prefer, when the prior probability is extremely low, testing entire databases will tend to find a lot of false positives)
DNA analysis is a powerful technique, but you still have to be careful to make sure you are asking the right question.
[1] there is viability in how many which unfortunately are somewhat variable, but I'm ignoring that
That is the terrifying part. Does anybody known how much data these databases are actually storing about someone's DNA, after processing? I ask because in the case of some forensic DNA matching techniques, the set of possible results is small enough to have birthday paradox problems.
Matching an unknown sample against a handful of suspects is probably fine, but fishing in an entire database of for hits on a set of cold cases? I suspect the probability of finding a false positive grows quickly when the number of possible matches increases.