The article quotes Denver's district attorney as saying that this familial DNA searching is especially good for "cold cases where the victims are women or children". <i>Women or children.</i> We're searching through databases of innocent people's DNA, finding potentially damaging false positives, all because we need to keep <i>women and children</i> safe. Has this guy been binge watching Mad Men?
This is why I didn't use 23andMe's service. Because it's in their database, forever.<p>I want a genetic sequencing service where they sequence everything, put it on multiple encrypted USB sticks and send it to you. Once you confirm you received your copy, they destroy the backup USB sticks.<p>They never will store it on some centralized server. It will never end up on some tape backup. They will never have a copy after you get yours.<p>Then you need DNA analysis software that runs offline.<p>Most of them won't want to do that although, because it makes them a commodity service.
This title is inaccurate and misleading. The cops searched a publicly accessible Ancestry.com DNA database. Ancestry.com did then hand over the individual's name after receiving a court order. It also later shuttered the public database as a result of learning that cops were using it in this manner.<p>There is no allegation in this article that 23andme or Ancestry.com has turned over private DNA information (although it's certainly plausible that this has occurred or one day will occur).
I have pitched to 23andme a few times over the last few years that they should accept Bitcoin, and offer totally PII-free purchases. This is a great use of a cryptocurrency to my mind; a legitimate good which one should in no way attach to one's identity.<p>I would use that service. But, I would never, ever send them my DNA attached to my identity.<p>Sounds like I can't be the first to use Bitcoin with them either, come to think of it..
I had personal, but short encounter with 23andMe.<p>I proceed with my charge and got the spit kit. Then a friend told me "it's pretty much a Google-owned company", so that was enough for me to change my mind.<p>I was still intrigued what they might find about me, so I asked 23, before sending the kit back, if I could actually cancel the order and re-order, but use my friend's credit card, with their permission of course.<p>23 responded that I can cancel, of course, but they do not allow to use someone else's CC, whether with or without their consent. I asked "why", and was told that "we need to identify the spit with the owner". God knows for what, but latest news that 23 is okay to share your DNA with insurance companies (I can bet bottom dollar they won't share it for free!) makes much more sense now, after all.<p>I cancelled my order and send the kit back, but I wasn't done quite yet. From $99 order, I only got $45 back. I was told that "the kit cannot be reused, so it has to be thrown away". So I said: fine, give me the kit I paid for back, and keep the remaining $. They refused, and continued to refuse to refund the remaining portion of my charge.<p>Eventually, a credit card chargeback dispute that they lost took care of it and after recovering all the costs, I emailed all my friends never to do a mistake and give your business to 23andMe.
A lot of legal reasoning w.r.t. DNA has been too quick to equate DNA with fingerprints. Obviously, DNA contains far more information than fingerprints, to the point where it literally contains an entire copy of you. I cannot believe how blatant the violations of our rights are these days, and how passive people are in the face of this new dimension of intrusion.<p><a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_27566601/california-dna-collection-law-now-before-state-supreme" rel="nofollow">http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_27566601/californ...</a><p>This shit really pisses me off. The state supreme court found California's collection of DNA samples for people _arrested_ but never charged or convicted to be unconstitutional. Apparently, that ruling has now been overturned.<p>Please fight law enforcement's new encroaching on our rights. We are now safer than we ever have been and yet the government STILL wants more power.
From the original article [1]:
"If the idea of investigators poking through your DNA freaks you out, both Ancestry.com and 23andMe have options to delete your information with the sites. 23andMe says it will delete information within 30 days upon request."<p>One may wonder if they treat this policy much like Ashley Madison treated their removal promise.<p>[1]: <a href="http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/" rel="nofollow">http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-...</a>
More source material for the "Don't talk to cops" argument. If there is anyone who hasn't seen it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc</a>
This is exactly the type of bullshit I'm talking about when I try to stress privacy to people I know and they think I'm a lunatic. Most people don't want to hear what "could" happen, only what has happened in the past.
> This is not only because of privacy concerns—the people who contribute their DNA to such endeavors, whether medical or genealogical, rarely expect to have their genetic code scrutinized by cops—but also because those databases haven’t been vetted for use by law enforcement.<p>It's a real shame that behavior like this will stifle progress. I had been interested in doing 23andMe, and now I'm reconsidering it.
Data should have attorney/client privileges. That would solve all this privacy stuff. No, just because the data exist, does not mean you can just have it. If both my attorney (23&me) and I agree that you may use it, then yes, otherwise, no. Never ever ever will you get it and no court can rule otherwise. It's red oculus that we have to be afraid to use all these services because what they might do with our data and who they might sell it too.
I asked 23andMe if they could somehow anonymize my account and they didn't even seem to understand what I want. They said I could change my username but I wanted a more thorough anonymization. That was a while ago (years), maybe they'll understand eventually.<p>(I wasn't worried about law enforcement, but I can think of all sorts of undesirable scenarios should their database ever leak, which it probably will).
I bought a kit from 23andMe a few years back and was quite keen to get information on my genetics and health factors. However, I realised by submitting my DNA to them, it would probably go into global dataset for law enforcement. I was ok to do this for myself, but putting you DNA into a dataset like this can also potentially affect your family which is something I didn't want to do.
Especially disturbing in light of this recent article about the systemtic mishandling of DNA evidence.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10366761" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10366761</a><p>Unsurprisingly, it seems that the labs are biased in favor of their primary customers: the proseccution.
The other database I really mistrust is medical DNA databases. First because of the reasons mentioned in this article. But also because coming from a family of doctors myself, I know they are computer illiterate, which gives me little trust in their ability to not leak the data in the wild.
It is commonly said that there is a 1-in-a-million chance of falsely matching someone else. I don't know where that is from, but if you're 1 in a million, there are 318 Americans just like you.
"As NYU law professor Erin Murphy told the New Orleans Advocate regarding the Usry case, gathering DNA information is “a series of totally reasonable steps by law enforcement.” If you’re a cop trying to solve a crime, and you have DNA at your disposal, you’re going to want to use it to further your investigation."<p>If the police broke into people's houses to snoop through their private effects, that would help solve crimes too, but it doesn't mean it's "totally reasonable" -- why is snooping through private DNA records "totally reasonable"?
I thought the DNA analysis being done by these companies wasn't full sequencing, but rather genotyping. Isn't the implication of this less alarming?
Could we edit the headline to be less sensational? Wired's article is nowhere near as sensational.<p>It doesn't even state what this headline is saying
That seems less of an issue about privacy, and more like a case about badly used genetics/statistics. DNA is fallible, at least with the currently used technology, and police have to get that into their heads. It's not the fault of 23andMe or others if police and prosecutors don't understand the implications.
Yaniv Erlich and Arvind Narayanan "Routes for breaching and protecting genetic privacy" <a href="http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v15/n6/abs/nrg3723.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v15/n6/abs/nrg3723.html</a>
Interesting read that goes along the OP theme:<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/10/09/447202433/-great-pause-among-forensic-scientists-as-dna-proves-fallible" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/2015/10/09/447202433/-great-pause-among-f...</a>
(Relevant lightly-edited repost from my prior comment almost 2 years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6797054" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6797054</a>)<p>Were you born in the US after 1963? If so, your state of birth probably already took a sample of your blood for genetic disease testing at birth:<p><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/19/opinion/la-oe-timmermans-infant-genetic-screening-20130719" rel="nofollow">http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/19/opinion/la-oe-timmer...</a><p>Parental consent is not required – though with enough advance effort and written request, opting-out is possible.<p>Further, many states retain the "residual dried blood spots" for more than 6 months and in some cases, indefinitely:<p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16737872" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16737872</a><p>So a sample of your genetic material may already exist in a state government filing cabinet, somewhere. (Your state capital? Each county?)<p>In California, the retained information <i>and sample</i> can be used "for medical intervention, counseling or specific research projects which the California Board of Health approves" and "anonymous research studies". See the section "Storage and Use of Dried Blood Spots" at:<p><a href="http://www.babysfirsttest.org/newborn-screening/states/california#second-section" rel="nofollow">http://www.babysfirsttest.org/newborn-screening/states/calif...</a><p>For newborns, the California program currently tests for 79 different disorders:<p><a href="http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/nbs/Documents/NBS-DisordersDetectable011312.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/nbs/Documents/NBS-DisordersD...</a><p>And the per-disease records are apparently kept for lookup-by-individual without retesting, because there's a routine by-email process for requesting long-ago sickle-cell results (back to 1990) about NCAA student athletes:<p><a href="http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/nbs/Pages/NBSFAQTraitAthletes.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/nbs/Pages/NBSFAQTraitAthlete...</a><p>And that's not even considering all the health procedures (blood donations, tests, surgeries) or natural shedding (hairs, skin, saliva, excrement) routine in a normal life. You are a firehose of genetic samples, to any even slightly attentive observer, or even passive observers who take an interest some time later.<p>So: good luck keeping your genes from the state, if it really wants them.
Yet, Women are also more likely to kill there intimate partner. (This flips if you include ex partners.) Which may seem like a surprising statistic, but women often feel the need to use weapons to equalize a physical situation. Which can easily turn deadly.<p><i>Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological fathers was slightly higher than for biological mothers.[4]
However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% were killed by males.[4]
Males were more likely to be murder victims (76.8%).[4]</i><p>~ 1 in 4 women and ~1 in 7 men will be victims of severe violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes.<p>PS: The classic sitcom frying pan may seem funny, but it's a deadly weapon. <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FryingPanOfDoom" rel="nofollow">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FryingPanOfDoom</a>
<i>Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA</i><p>What's with the title here? Not only is that not the title of the article, but 23andMe isn't even in the article at all.
Url changed from <a href="http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-customers-dna/" rel="nofollow">http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-...</a>, which points to this. Edit: nope.
It's a sad comment on HN that the interesting discussion of this is buried under the braying of people of people who would appear to be more at home in /r/mensrights or some similar commune of sex offender apologists and woman-haters.