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donnay
10-18-2015, 08:30 PM
Cops Demand Customers’ DNA From Genealogy Sites
“It has this really Orwellian state feeling to it,” privacy advocate said

by Kashmir Hill | Fusion.net | October 18, 2015

When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement.

DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes.

It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient.

“Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996.

The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier.

Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”

Read more: http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/

Zippyjuan
10-18-2015, 09:00 PM
A bit farther down in the article notes that they need a court order.


Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe stipulate in their privacy policies that they will turn information over to law enforcement if served with a court order. 23andMe says it’s received a couple of requests from both state law enforcement and the FBI, but that it has “successfully resisted them.”

donnay
10-18-2015, 09:15 PM
This story should follow...

Ancestry.com is quietly transforming itself into a medical research juggernaut

by Daniela Hernandez

In 1984, a genealogy geek named John Sittner published The Source, a book meant to unearth and analyze never-before-seen records that genealogists could use to put together family histories with unprecedented detail. Several years later, he founded Ancestry magazine to teach people how they could use public archives and technology—which, back then, meant CD-ROMS and primitive websites and search engines—to build out their family trees.

Sittner sold the company long ago, but three decades after it began, Ancestry.com—the $1.6 billion Internet company that his magazine evolved into—is poised to become one of the most unlikely, yet powerful, scientific tools in the world. For about three years, it’s been collecting and analyzing genetic information through a service called AncestryDNA, and in the process, quietly asking consumers if they’d be willing to share their data with Ancestry for research. To date, it’s banked more than 800,000 samples from customers all over the world, rivaling the database of Google-backed genetics-analysis company 23andMe, which boasts about 900,000 samples. And now, armed with mountains of health data, Ancestry.com is slowly transforming itself from a retiree’s hobby into a medical research juggernaut.

“We actually do think that health is a pretty natural extension of the core mission to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history,” Ancestry.com CEO Tim Sullivan told me earlier this week, during a visit to the company’s San Francisco offices. “We’re exploring ways that we could participate in health and provide our users with health insights, for sure….ways that we could leverage the data we’ve aggregated to support research efforts, similar to what 23andMe has done with Genentech and others.”

Long before Ancestry.com got into the DNA game, it had ties to the Mormon church. Its owners were two Brigham Young University grads who had made their fortune selling Latter-day Saints publications on floppy disks. Access to Ancestry.com was free at LDS Family History Centers, and recently the company signed a deal with the church’s genealogy non-profit, FamilySearch.org.

Read more: http://fusion.net/story/113571/ancestry-com-is-quietly-transforming-itself-into-a-medical-research-juggernaut/

Anti Federalist
10-18-2015, 09:23 PM
A bit farther down in the article notes that they need a court order.

Yeah, like they need a "warrant" to take your blood on the side of the road.

Like "writs of assistance", handed out like party favors.

Zippyjuan
10-18-2015, 09:45 PM
This story should follow...

Ancestry.com is quietly transforming itself into a medical research juggernaut

by Daniela Hernandez

In 1984, a genealogy geek named John Sittner published The Source, a book meant to unearth and analyze never-before-seen records that genealogists could use to put together family histories with unprecedented detail. Several years later, he founded Ancestry magazine to teach people how they could use public archives and technology—which, back then, meant CD-ROMS and primitive websites and search engines—to build out their family trees.

Sittner sold the company long ago, but three decades after it began, Ancestry.com—the $1.6 billion Internet company that his magazine evolved into—is poised to become one of the most unlikely, yet powerful, scientific tools in the world. For about three years, it’s been collecting and analyzing genetic information through a service called AncestryDNA, and in the process, quietly asking consumers if they’d be willing to share their data with Ancestry for research. To date, it’s banked more than 800,000 samples from customers all over the world, rivaling the database of Google-backed genetics-analysis company 23andMe, which boasts about 900,000 samples. And now, armed with mountains of health data, Ancestry.com is slowly transforming itself from a retiree’s hobby into a medical research juggernaut.

“We actually do think that health is a pretty natural extension of the core mission to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history,” Ancestry.com CEO Tim Sullivan told me earlier this week, during a visit to the company’s San Francisco offices. “We’re exploring ways that we could participate in health and provide our users with health insights, for sure….ways that we could leverage the data we’ve aggregated to support research efforts, similar to what 23andMe has done with Genentech and others.”

Long before Ancestry.com got into the DNA game, it had ties to the Mormon church. Its owners were two Brigham Young University grads who had made their fortune selling Latter-day Saints publications on floppy disks. Access to Ancestry.com was free at LDS Family History Centers, and recently the company signed a deal with the church’s genealogy non-profit, FamilySearch.org.

Read more: http://fusion.net/story/113571/ancestry-com-is-quietly-transforming-itself-into-a-medical-research-juggernaut/

National Geographic has a pretty interesting DNA program. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/about/

donnay
10-18-2015, 11:12 PM
DNA is great when you are trying to get out of jail for a crime you did not commit. However, DNA in the wrong hands can be a very bad thing.

How many prosecutors have deliberately withheld information just so they could get a conviction? That's the wrong hands, I am talking about.