As the debate about re-identification of “anonymized” data rages on, this story may be of interest:
A Dutch woman has managed to trace her donor father using commercial dna banks in the US, the Volkskrant reports on Tuesday. Emi Stikkelman, 32, sent three dna samples to dna banks, where a match was found with an Australian woman. Together with family history researcher Els Leijs, she was able to put together a family tree and finally identify her biological father. Normal dna banks use 20 key markers but commercial agencies can use thousands, allowing them to cast a much wider net of potential relatives, the paper said. Leijs uses commercial data banks such as Family Tree, Ancestry and 23andMe which are particularly popular in the US and have been set up to allow people to trace their heritage. ‘Almost all Americans have roots outside the US, in Europe and Africa,’ she said.
Read more on DutchNews.nl.