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.
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.