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One of the Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With the FBI (buzzfeednews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Family Tree DNA, one of the largest private genetic testing companies whose home-testing kits enable people to trace their ancestry and locate relatives, is working with the FBI and allowing agents to search its vast genealogy database in an effort to solve violent crime cases, BuzzFeed News has learned. Federal and local law enforcement have used public genealogy databases for more than two years to solve cold cases, including the landmark capture of the suspected Golden State Killer, but the cooperation with Family Tree DNA and the FBI marks the first time a private firm has agreed to voluntarily allow law enforcement access to its database. While the FBI does not have the ability to freely browse genetic profiles in the library, the move is sure to raise privacy concerns about law enforcement gaining the ability to look for DNA matches, or more likely, relatives linked by uploaded user data.
The Houston-based company, which touts itself as a pioneer in the genetic testing industry and the first to offer a direct-to-consumer test kit, disclosed its relationship with the FBI to BuzzFeed News on Thursday, saying in a statement that allowing access "would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever." While Family Tree does not have a contract with the FBI, the firm has agreed to test DNA samples and upload the profiles to its database on a case-by-case basis since last fall, a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Its work with the FBI is "a very new development, which started with one case last year and morphed," she said. To date, the company has cooperated with the FBI on fewer than 10 cases. The Family Tree database is free to access and can be used by anyone with a DNA profile to upload, not just paying customers.
The Houston-based company, which touts itself as a pioneer in the genetic testing industry and the first to offer a direct-to-consumer test kit, disclosed its relationship with the FBI to BuzzFeed News on Thursday, saying in a statement that allowing access "would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever." While Family Tree does not have a contract with the FBI, the firm has agreed to test DNA samples and upload the profiles to its database on a case-by-case basis since last fall, a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Its work with the FBI is "a very new development, which started with one case last year and morphed," she said. To date, the company has cooperated with the FBI on fewer than 10 cases. The Family Tree database is free to access and can be used by anyone with a DNA profile to upload, not just paying customers.
Fun story.. crime labs were seeing the same DNA strand all over various crime sites and authorities thought they had a massive serial killer case brewing before they tracked the traces back to a person who worked the machinery that makes the swabs the police use to collect evidence.
The problem with these sorts of drag nets isn't just the privacy implications, which are huge in their own right, but the inevitable false positives that will land people in prison facing DA's who will fight tooth and nail to prevent that conviction from being overturned. Police today aren't trained to have the skills to investigate past the first reasonable suspect and just keep banging on them until they cave and "confess" or are irrefutably ruled out.
We need police and prosecutorial reform as much as we need a tightening of privacy laws.
They don't need your DNA, just someone close to you in the family tree, and they'll basically have your DNA as well.
What you mean is they don't need the perpetrator of the crime to have been tested by Family Tree DNA, they just need your sample collected at the crime scene to match for distant relatives.
What you mean is they don't need your DNA at all, they let Family Tree DNA pick a random name out of a hat and then focus the investigation you, ala Salem Witch Trial style.
It was only two weeks ago Slashdot posted this article: https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/01/18/2253228/identical-twins-test-5-dna-ancestry-kits-get-different-results-on-eac
Two identical twins "bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis"
The tests all showed them as non-matches and some showed them as unrelated, even though they are identical twins from the same parents.
So it isn't even possible for the FBI *using this DNA data* to narrow down anything, they are literally getting random peoples names and any successful detective work was in spite of the contradicting DNA data, not because of it.
What you mean is they don't need your DNA at all, they let Family Tree DNA pick a random name out of a hat and then focus the investigation you, ala Salem Witch Trial style.
It was only two weeks ago Slashdot posted this article: https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/01/18/2253228/identical-twins-test-5-dna-ancestry-kits-get-different-results-on-eac
Two identical twins "bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis"
The tests all showed them as non-matches and some showed them as unrelated, even though they are identical twins from the same parents.
Did you read the bleeping article?
The article was about ethnic ancestries.
And only some of the companies had wildly different results.
Some did not. Ancestry and MyHeritageDNA were pretty close.
Identical twins do not have identical DNA. Without knowing how the companies calculate these percentages, a one or two percentage point difference in ethnic ancestries is not a surprise.
And nowhere does the article say the twins were unrelated. Even the sampled data from 23andme was 99.6% identical. They just messed up the ethnic ancestry profiles.
The article also does not say anything about FamilyTreeDNA other than to say the twins submitted DNA to FamilyTreeDNA which didn't give identical ethnic ancestry profiles, and that FTDNA reported Middle Eastern ancestry (for both) which was not consistent with family oral history.
The message of the story is that these operations are wrong about ethnic ancestries. That's no surprise. And the fact that they report ethnic ancestries that conflicts with family oral history is also no surprise.
The methodology used for these ethnic ancestries is far from perfect. They may be working with probabilities of genetic markers being found in one identified group vs. other identified groups, data gaps in their "ethnicity" databases, limitations of consumer-grade DNA sequencing, and so on.
Don't read anything more into the article than exactly what it says.
Also, for anybody who's using these companies to help with their geneology research, they're one tool among many and the results are used in a greater context, with substantiating evidence. Or the results are used to point in the certain direction or to improve verification of other research, operating on a probability basis.
In the current legal system, people won't be convicted by DNA found in FamilyTreeDNA. That's one of the starting points for law enforcement, not the end.
Privacy concerns notwithstanding, I'd be a helluva lot more concerned about false convictions due to legal system bias (racial, financial, etc.) and poor use of DNA technology (misuse of touch DNA results, DNA contamination in the lab, etc.) than whatever the FBI will learn with FTDNA.