Peter Aldhous reports:
For the first time on record, the new forensic science of genetic genealogy has been used to identify a suspect in a case of violent assault. Cops in Utah had to obtain special permission to upload crime scene DNA to a website called GEDmatch, which had previously only allowed police to investigate homicides or rapes.
Critics worry that the case, which led to the arrest of a 17-year-old high school student who has not yet been named, marks the start of a “slippery slope” to law enforcement using such methods to investigate increasingly less serious offenses, eroding people’s genetic privacy.
Read more on BuzzFeed.
This is going to continue to be a significant privacy concern until sites create privacy policies that they then STICK TO. If you post a privacy policy about how your data may be used or disclosed and people opt-in based on your words in your policy, and you then do not stick to that, well….. how is this not a matter for the FTC to take up as a violation of Section 5?