Easy DNA Identifications With Genealogy Databases Raise Privacy Concerns

Police in California made headlines this spring when they charged a former police officer with being the Golden State Killer, a man who allegedly committed a series of notorious rapes and murders in the 1970s and '80s.

Authorities revealed they used DNA from a publicly available genealogy website to crack the case.

Since then, police around the country have started doing the same sort of thing to solve other cold cases.

In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers projected that they could identify third cousins and more closely related relatives in more than 60 percent of people of European descent. (They chose this group because most people in their database have that ancestry.)

"It's kind of like each person in this database is a beacon that illuminates hundreds of distant relatives. So it's enough to have your third cousin or your second cousin once-removed in these databases to actually identify you."

And when the researchers combined their strategy with other information, such a specific geographic area or the approximate age of a person, they could quickly reduce a list of possibilities to just a few people.   (NPR, October 11, 2018)
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