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A comment on Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a crime. Parent comment

Re:Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a ... by phkahler on Monday August 15, 2022 @03:41PM (#32474342)
DNA can be used to verify a suspect, it is not really valid to compare a crime scene sample to a national database because you WILL get a match with high probability even if the perp is not in the database. DNA is not a unique identifier, at least no the way its used.

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.

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Re:Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a ... by dekhn on Monday August 15, 2022 @04:01PM (#32474632)
In the way that it's used, DNA is as close to a unique identifier as you can get. There are many techniques. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling You can tune the stringency but they shouldn't be causing enough false positives that screening will just turn up random people. More likely to get close relatives of people in the room at some point. See "partial matching" on the linked page.
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