From INTERPOL:
LYON, France: In 2004, Croatian police found a man’s body in the Adriatic Sea.
The condition of the body, which rendered identification through fingerprints or facial recognition impossible, meant that – for more than a decade – it remained unidentified.
Enter I-Familia, a groundbreaking new database officially launched this month that applies cutting-edge scientific research and uses the DNA of relatives to identify missing persons or unidentified human remains around the world.
In late 2020, DNA from the children of an Italian man missing since 2004 was added to I-Familia and then checked against DNA from all unidentified human remains in the system.
A match was found between the children’s DNA and that of the body found in the Adriatic Sea, closing a case that had gone cold 16 years earlier.
Read more about the I-Familia database and program on INTERPOL.
Reading through the description, they do say that the database is “not connected” to their criminal database:
Data protection
The processing of DNA data via INTERPOL is carried out via secure communications channels and in compliance with the Organization’s robust data protection rules as well as the INTERPOL policy on using family DNA profiles of missing persons for kinship matching.
Family members must give their consent for their data to be used for international searching. There is no nominal data attached to the profile, which is submitted in the form of an alphanumerical code. INTERPOL’s Constitution and commitment to neutrality mean that I-Familia does not collect or use any data related to race. Member countries retain ownership of the DNA profiles submitted.
I-Familia is applied only to missing persons in a dedicated database and is not connected to INTERPOL’s criminal databases.
So this sounds good and of humanitarian value. But how many of us are so cynical or jaded by now that we think it’s only a matter of time before the data is used for other purposes?