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I wonder if this is commonly done by law enforcement:
Quote:
investigators used crime scene DNA and matched it to a relative who was registered on genealogy sites and narrowed down possible suspects using that person's family history.
Quote:
The detectives would find family trees that appeared to be a match to DNA they had for the Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist. The investigators would look at the people listed on the tree and see whether any of them could be a suspect, the newspaper said.
A 2014 study in the United Kingdom found that familial DNA searches had a success rate of just 17per cent, Wired reported.
Ancestry.com and 23andme officials say their databases aren't useful to most criminal investigations because they analyze regions of DNA different from the locations forensic experts explore.
I think the usefulness is going to depend on who your 'family' is too. A smaller family will potentially have less people testing and it may be harder to find a close match. If the criminal is adopted or illegitimate , he/she may be unknown by the biological family.
Anyone can go to Gedmatch, upload a DNA file and find relatives....
I think cops are doing this very often.
Maybe they create fake profiles at Gedmatch, upload a file and they get what they are looking for
Lead investigator Paul Holes, a cold case expert and retired Contra Costa County District Attorney inspector, said his team’s biggest tool was GEDmatch, a Florida-based website that pools raw genetic profiles that people share publicly. No court order was needed to access that site’s large database of genetic blueprints. Other major private DNA ancestral sites said they were not approached by police for this case.
If it wasn't common before, it will be now. I am very concerned about privacy issues here.
Seriously....privacy issues? When someone posts their info online it is no longer private. When working at a law office FB and all social media posts were being used in cases starting years ago.
I agree with the privacy being given up if posted on a publicly accessible website. However, I doubt many thought through this any more than facebook users thought about where things could end up.
I wonder what portion of those who made dna public would think they did the right thing now?
Not that they want to protect a distant relative who is guilty but it opens up to abuses too. What is to prevent someone from posting publicaly someone else's dna without their consent similar to one posters comment above? Or is that even possible?
Anyone can go to Gedmatch, upload a DNA file and find relatives....
I think cops are doing this very often.
Maybe they create fake profiles at Gedmatch, upload a file and they get what they are looking for
I don't think they are doing it much at all. If you read the article, it took a lot of hours and manpower to do this. The genealogy company gave them a huge list of names that had similar DNA strings and that could be related to him. They had to eliminate them all one by one, then when they did find DNA relatives, they had to investigate farther to pinpoint this man. They are not going to do this amount of labor for just any crook. This man killed 12 people and raped 40-some women (that they know about). This case wasn't closed, but wasn't actively being investigated anymore since the last (known) murder in 1986. Someone in the department decided to try this, and it worked. But again, too labor intensive for it to be used a lot.
They did this with the cooperation of the company.
It does make me concerned about privacy issues though, not so much for police but government and who knows what's coming down the pike.
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