These samples are degraded- there may be multiple individuals in the mixture-so analysis becomes much trickier and the process is more error prone, and you’re not even sure the profile you generated is from the suspect themselves. It’s one thing to analyze DNA from a cheek swab or a tube of spit, but when you’re talking about crime scene samples, it’s a whole different game. A new television ad campaign scheduled to air in San Diego this spring, however, encourages users to continue to allow law enforcement to have access to their genetic data. The company quickly added an option for customers to opt-out of sharing their information with the FBI last month. Earlier this year, Buzzfeed reporters discovered that US federal law enforcement had been working with the company FamilyTreeDNA. GEDMatch is just a small pond in a sea of genetic data available to authorities. Since then, US law enforcement has solved dozens of cold cases using publicly available DNA.
Police pretended to be just another customer looking for family members on GEDMatch sure enough, the service led them to DeAngelo.
DNA DATABASE GRAPHS AGAINST UNIVERSAL DATABASE FREE
Most famously, police found and arrested Joseph James DeAngelo, known as the “Golden State Killer,” by uploading genetic evidence found from decades-old crime scenes to GEDMatch, a free website created by two amateur genetic genealogists in 2010, and which had roughly a million users as of last year.
Law-enforcing agencies have taken advantage of these databases ever since. In 2018, US law enforcement learned that the Virginia-based biotech company Parabon NaNoLabs had started to dabble in a field called forensic genealogy: uploading samples from crime scenes to public genetic databases in the hopes of turning up a match. AP Photo/Khue Bui An image of the plans for a national database of criminal DNA, issued in 1998.
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