It's about a kind of perfidy. It's the reason you in war don't masquerade as someone who is wounded and to try to get at your enemy, and don't use fake medical stuff in ruses, &c (this of course happened once in Pakistan, but I count it as those responsible lacking in understanding and being short-sighted).
You don't ever do anything that will in any way affect people's trust in the medical system, even indirectly. This has been understood for a long time, and is part of the reason why the Hippocratic oath (i.e. the actual Hippocratic oath) involves swearing to never do any harm.
Second, DNA matching is a matter of chance. While comparing a sample to a single potential match is extremely reliable, comparing a sample to a population is not. You're basically running into a birthday paradox here: given a large enough dataset, false matches are guaranteed to happen.
If you use biometrics databases like this, you basically end up reverting the burden of proof: your DNA was at the crime scene, can you explain how it got there if you are indeed innocent?
But broadly the big utility is in matching distant relatives versus strangers from the lot, and seeing if there is agreement with those putative matches with actual records and other hard evidence. You share half your DNA with either parent, 1/8 with your first cousin, and so on and so fourth for the rest of the human race. Using that information coupled with other pieces of evidence can yield a pretty reliable hit and is how they managed to catch the Golden State killer using DNA and genealogy.
I'm not sure how these two things are issues when comparing fingerprinting to DNA matching. They seem to be applicable to both.
There is also the CSI effect to take into account and once again, the bloody fact we don't need to be preserving this data in perpetuity.
This is why Third Party Doctrine is a complete and total deconstruction of the 4th Amendment in practice.
I'd hate to become a suspect in a crime because of some profile worked up by a behavioral analyst at the FBI and something in my DNA suggests I could fit the profile.
They're looking at a dozen or more locations. The number of repeats at any location is unrelated to the number of repeats at another location.
So, if you've got a number between 2 and 10 or 20, you've got 10% to 5% of the population that has that particular number of repeats. 1/(0.1 ^ 13) is 10 trillion which is the ballpark for the number of variations for STRs possible on a 13 location test.
The data that is stored looks like [6 4 12 16 2 15 19 18 14 5 3 7 8]
I might be on board if you could make the stronger claim that they can’t look for behavioral features nor will they be able to in the future. A good hash provides that guarantee.
That being said, these data are being used for actually legally actionable things: first order pattern recognition using the same legal frameworks as fingerprints. Not second order "what do these patterns actually do in the body" or third order "what do these functions in the body do for the individual", each of which would probably take a PhD project to work out.
Where is this required? Because I've never heard of such a thing in the US.
In this case it sounds like they used it for verification, since the sought a comparison of a suspect with a specific baby's DNA. From a science perspective this seems quite reasonable. From a privacy PoV IDK.
I know you were attempting to draw a parallel, but the difference is that the DMV is a government organization (part of the DOT), and your medical provider is not. There are different expectations of privacy. Which is close to the heart of the issue.
There's probably a curve where it gets scary again as you know more about it.
DNA isn't just identification. It is a lot more than just a unique identifier, it is a whole history and a lot of future probabilities.
My list of SNPs is a lot less "if you have nothing to hide" about it.
Imagine a government which looks at SCN1/SCN2 before issuing a drivers license.
Society as a whole would probably be a lot better off if we stopped pretending driving around 4,000-lb hunks of metal at 80mph/130kph was some sort of inalienable right and actually showed some discretion in who was allowed to do it and who wasn't. But it's not realistic, especially if you live outside of a city.
The link you cite with "1 in billions" odds is exactly the sort of misrepresentation I'm talking about. Combine smaller-than-pretended probabilities with big database trawling and it becomes a bit like the "birthday problem": it provides really good odds of finding someone to pin the crime on, but very little confidence that it was really them.
On top of that, merely being a dna match does not mean you are going to jail. You need corroborating evidence just like how finger prints are used. The odds of a false positive that 1) is a dna match and 2) was in the right place at the right time and lacks and alibi and has a potential motive for the crime must be a trillion to one.
There are some other differences too though: you're much more in control over where you leave your fingerprints than where you leave your DNA and fingerprints are not connected to your relatives. Not leaving any traces of your DNA is essentially almost impossible.
What concerns me that is people might be hesitant to do this blood screening for their newborns if they were ever involved in a crime, even a minor one, which would negatively impact their (innocent) newborns. With fingerprints you can be reasonably sure you didn't leave them with pretty basic precautions, and you don't need to fear your children's fingerprints fingering you in the first place. With DNA that's quite different.
So I'm not so sure the trade-off is worth it here, except for some of the most serious crimes.
The parents may no longer be criminals; they may have done a few stupid things when they were 18 or whatnot. Not excusing it, but also don't need to go above and beyond any lengths to solve these comparatively minor crimes: literally no one is served by that: not the victims of the crime, not society, and certainly not their children. In more serious crimes, it may be worth the trade-off – that I why I used the qualifier "except for some of the most serious crimes".
> make this sort of screening mandatory, much like how its a good idea to mandate vaccinations even if it steps on the toes of the poorly informed in the process.
It's not realistic this will be enacted any time soon, if ever, and any proposal needs to take this political reality in to account.
Also applying for a license means you are at or approaching the age of majority. Either you are applying for a license knowing that you once did a crime, or you're doing a crime knowing you once submitted a fingerprint for a license. That's very different from having your blood sampled as a newborn, and most people assume their health information had privacy protection.
Apples and oranges are both fruits, but they're not interchangeable.
The difference with DNA is that the genetic data has a ton of info associated with it, and that in this case it was collected for healthcare purposes. Fingerprints don't carry sensitive health data. The arguments are different.
Today, a crime would happen, you leave DNA, the police attempt to match it with a DNA sample in their databases you might have submitted for a health screening. 4th amendment violation because DNA is scary to the lay person it seems. This is not from logical reasoning but from emotional reasoning, because for all intents and purposes DNA databases are being used exactly like fingerprint databases that are normalized in our society today, and shouldn't actually have this scrutiny (or maybe fingerprints should have more scrutiny if you are against DNA screening for crimes, because the logical arguments would be the same). Then again these articles generate clicks while I'm sure most would eyeroll a fingerprinting article.