Remember when they caught the Golden State Killer
by comparing DNA crime-scene evidence to big commercial genomic
databases (like those maintained by Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, etc) to
find his family members and then track him down?
It’s not just him.
If you’re an American of European descent, there’s a 60% chance that you
can be identified from genomic database searches, because even if
you’ve never signed up for one of these junk science services, your stupid cousins have.
They also predict that in the “near future,” “nearly any US individual
of European descent” will be identifiable from commercial genomic
databases.
The researchers propose a mitigation technique for avoiding
nonconsensual genetic profiling: “DTC providers should cryptographically
sign the text file containing the raw data available to customers (fig.
S6). Third-party services will be able to authenticate that a raw
genotyping file was created by a valid DTC provider and not further
modified. If adopted, our approach has the potential to prevent the
exploitation of long-range familial searches to identify research
subjects from genomic data. Moreover, it will complicate the
ability to conduct unilaterally long-range familial searches from DNA
evidence.
