And also contributing is the increased sensitivity of the DNA amplification methods and lax procedures at most labs. See http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/forensics-gone-wrong-...
>In 2013, geneticist Michael Coble of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, set up a hypothetical scenario in which a mix of DNA from several people had been found on a ski mask left at a crime scene after a series of robberies. Coble asked 108 labs across the country to determine whether a separate DNA sample, which he posited had come from a suspect in the robberies, was also part of the mix. Seventy-three of the labs got it wrong, saying the suspect's DNA was part of the mix when, in fact, it was not.
A defendant is one expert witness away from undermining a case that relies on that low of a resolution of matching alone. In this case, that data was only used as a pointer to suggest to police that deeper scrutiny of the identified suspect was warranted.
and an uninformed 'jury of your peers' away from a false conviction..
To see how things were actually done, RTFA.
It's not stealing.
First off, if you discard something in the trash you no longer are laying a claim to it and giving it up for the trash handlers.
Secondly, it was established in California v. Greenwood that you don't have a privacy right to trash left out on the public curb for pickup; which obviously implies that you don't have a privacy right to trash placed in a public bin.
I personally think privacy laws need to be set up right away. I think it should be illegal, even in cases of national security, to infer something from your DNA from others, such as relatives without the use of a warrant.
you should not end up in what is effectively a police line up just because your brother submitted his dna to the public domain. people should not be able to use information about his dna, in any way imaginable to infer anything about you.
There's a world of difference between evidence submittable at a trial and evidence making someone worthy of suspicion and further investigation. I agree the bar on the former should be high; the bar on the latter being low on average leads to faster perpetrator identification and a safer community.
Imagine I could read your mind by reading someone else mind. are you ok with me having access to your private thoughts just because someone gave me access to their mind?
Even if you and I were parent and child, I don't think there's a reasonable philosophy of ownership on which you could hinge the notion that I can't donate the DNA in my cells to a cause because the pattern of half of the (physically completely independent) DNA in your body has a relationship to my own.
I do think you're touching upon possibly an interesting wrinkle in the way our current philosophy of ownership treats data about groups vs. data about an individual. Similar lines of thought underpin the question of whether your friends are culpable for sending data about themselves to Cambridge Analytica if it allows CA to extrapolate information about you.
However, I currently know of no philosophy of ownership that makes the described scenario bad apart from the general "it's a dick move if you do it on purpose to screw someone else over" (but that hinges on the general category of "Don't screw people over on purpose," not on any concept of joint ownership of data).
To pull another analogy: imagine I had dated a rapist and although I didn't have enough evidence to get him convicted of a crime, I told all my friends he was dangerous and now they won't date him. Is this bad? Quite the opposite; it's the system that is already of necessity in place to protect people from bad actors that the legal system fails to handle.
How does one even come to such a conclusion?
Legally, the answer is pretty much "no" right now, and I think it's morally also "no."
Once a person discards any material as trash in a public space, it's fair game. The police didn't begin doing this sort of thing when DNA tests were invented.
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212170688...
I just used both methods listed to request account closure and deletion of all my data.
I suggest people do the same.
what I am leading up to is I can easily see where it becomes a requirement for others and it might start off with police forces because of the high visibility of abuse issues. From there it is not a big leap to other high visibility groups to include military and eventually everyone gets lumped in for medical safety and such.
It isn't that we need to be scared of what 3rd party sites do, it is that we need to be ahead of the game and limit how government can gain and maintain this information
In California, the police can add you to the database (forcibly if needed) if you are arrested for a felony, or if you have a felony record and are arrested for a misdemeanor.
Note that I used the word “arrested,” not “convicted.” SCOCal has ruled that a conviction is not needed. Just an arrest.
All of this came about through two different voter referenda.
(Although again, if the match turns out to be a prior suspect rather than a random person, that's another story—see the “defense attorney's fallacy” lower on the page.)
They do. The suspect is a "John Doe." But the suspect's DNA is the physical sample they have in the rape kit. IANAL, but it sounds like it should pass the criteria for targeted search.
Additionally, I think investigators tend to act more carefully in a high profile case than in a typical case, so I expect that they possess some additional conclusive evidence.
The scanned individuals opted in for relative matching. The fact those people were relatives of John Doe is publicly-documented knowledge in birth records and not susceptible to a privacy challenge.
Lets assume that instead of DNA evidence, they had a photo of a white van at the scene of the crime.
In that case it would be obvious that the police would search databases for people who own that model of car.
If police would need to have a specific suspect in mind before they start investigations, how would they ever be able to investigate anything?
With GDPR, you should be able to force 23andme to delete your DNA information after you received the results. That's if you're European at least.
I see no issues with this chain of investigation. Some tools the police have access to you cannot personally opt out of. That's working as intended.
In practical terms, I'm sure it's against the ToS but really the service providers have no way of knowing unless the person has already submitted their DNA and your submission raises a red flag, thus cutting you off from the information you desire. This is interesting from a game-theoretic standpoint in that it might be more secure to give your information to every website and then be the designated owner, but it probably wouldn't shield you from law enforcement getting the same information via subpoena. It's an uphill argument to say that a general right of privacy weighs heavier than the unsolved cases of 10 murders and 50 rapes, a record which will probably be broken again in future.
I don't think DNA testing companies have much incentive to screen potential customers since each person can only submit DNA once without raising another red flag.
Or simply Facebook. Imagine the improvement in advertising accuracy if it could use your DNA as a unique key in its database. Match
I know it would violate certain state laws regarding biometric data, but the penalty for violating those laws appears to be civil by and large, not criminal.
> As for whether it's a criminal act, I think that it might be a form of assault, maybe.
Are you suggesting that using their DNA without their consent is assault, or the taking of it from them? It'd be trivial to take it without contact with them, from e.g. a hair, or their toothbrush, particularly if you live with them.
If I were an insurance company, what's to stop me from hiring investigators to go through customers' garbage to find their DNA, analyze it, and then take "appropriate" action?
I wouldn't be so sure of that interpretation. In most places that I've lived, you could be arrested for taking things out of the trash, whether in front of your house, or even if dumped on the side of the road.
That being said, you can't trespass to obtain the trash.
Laws against discrimination, such as those for both genetic information and pre-existing conditions that already apply to health insurance in the US. Even if nothing stops you from getting the information, you are prohibited from using it.
On a fun side, I wonder what would happen if I submitted dogs or pigs saliva.
"GDPR, in contrast, explicitly recognizes the sensitive nature of genetic data collected in a variety of settings. In Article 9, an adjusted definition of special categories of personal data has been provided that includes genetic data and biometric data, among others." [1]
This is not new -- I believe there have been at least a couple of arrests made as the result of a suspect's relatives contributing DNA in lieu of actually obtaining one from the suspect directly -- and provided there's consent from the relatives, I can't see much grounds from restraining someone from allowing their own DNA to be used to build a case against someone else. It becomes a bit murkier if you start compelling people to contribute DNA to build a case against a family member, but even there I can see parallels to other types of evidence and it's not a clear slam-dunk to me that it ought to be barred unless the familial relationship is one where testimony would normally be covered by marital confidence or other privilege.
So caveat emptor as always...but yep I had just wondered in general about "right to delete" with respect to genomic data.
And the definition of personal data extends to any data that can be linked to you. For example, if a server records a log entry with your name and IP, and the server also records log entries with just the IP, all of the log entries are considered personal data, even for dynamic IPs in some instances[3].
There are some exceptions around criminal justice and the protection of persons and property, however, I still wouldn't be surprised if this DNA evidence were ruled inadmissible in the EU.
[1] Court of Justice of the European Union [2] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=160... [3] https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-...
It sure would seem awful suspicious if someone requested DNA deletion out of the blue. Not convictably-suspicious, but suspicious enough to warrant followup investigation. ;)
It still might. He's yet to be tried. He's yet to be convicted. It's going to be interesting / crazy to see how the ACLU reacts to this.
Also, in a way, this situation reminds me of the recent FB snafu. That is, access to your friends was granted by you (or me), not them.
The point being, personal privacy isn't so personal anymore.
What's the difference between this case and if the cops post a photo of a suspect and someone says "looks kinda like my co-worker, maybe a close relative" and that co-worker says "oh, that's my brother, we look alike, people mistake us for each other all the time." And then the DNA matches the brother.
People "unknowingly" give evidence to the police all the time. That's like complaining the police used information that someone blogged about to solve a crime.
The idea I could get arrested because my cousin coughed on a doorknob is terrifying. Everyone has that black sheep in their family. Why should I get harassed by the police every time they or someone they know commits a crime?
[1] https://www.palmcoastobserver.com/article/man-wrongly-arrest...
Seriously? That's all it takes for you to accept the police doesn't need a warrant? That the warrant is "just a technicality"?
If that were true, we wouldn't need judges to approve warrants. Police has and will abuse their powers without the judge being a filter for their actions. That should never change.
What I mean is, the interesting issue to me is whether it's OK for law enforcement to send a DNA sample and compel ancestry/genomic sites to respond with any matches, even if they do have a warrant. So I misspoke saying it's a technicality, what I really mean is that the issue is interesting to me even if a warrant were provided.
IIRC The Wire had an accurate description of its use as an interogation tool (note I did not say investigative tool).
The other two examples are true. Across the Atlantic polygraphs are regarded as a comedy technology and breathalyser tests are sufficient grounds only for arrest and an actual blood test.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/mar/15/drink-drivin...
Something along the lines of if only 0.01 percent of the world's population can match a DNA sequence found that still leaves us with a million matches where I just made up both those numbers.
Careful, your bias is showing..
This is why a strong prior, developed through traditional policework, is necessary to increase the reliability of DNA results - most results obtained through database trawling will be false - and these will be numerous if the database is large enough. It is also part of the reason why exonerations are more robust than identifications.
This particular case may not suffer from these statistical problems, but they are worth keeping in mind, as it sets a precedent.
That isn't bias but rather an understanding of burden of proof. If you think it is, then you are very fundamentally misinformed about how our society functions.
The reason I think it's particularly interesting is that it passes one of the basic tests I have for whether something should be searchable by law enforcement: Do they have a target in mind and a warrant to search for that target? For PRISM and the other things that Snowden warned us about, the answer was no: the government was doing dragnet surveillance of all sorts of data warehouses to find people who fit a profile, without knowing who they're looking for ahead of time. With this, they have to have a DNA sample found at a crime scene, and they're using that combined with a warrant to do a targeted search for people with matching DNA. It just happens to be a website that people send their DNA to, rather than a police database.
So I'm actually inclined to say I think this is ok? But I'm not 100% sure how I feel yet.
EDIT: ok it looks like this was done not necessarily with a warrant, but with the officer just submitting the DNA as if they're a customer of the site. But actually my point still stands if they changed their technique to instead use a warrant and ask the site directly, not hiding that they were police officers... it's just that in this case they didn't even need to because it's so easy to just send others' DNA samples to these sites? It really seems like the lack of a warrant was a technicality here and could have easily gone the other way and still got to the same result.