SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for soylent_red
US court let police search GEDmatch's entire DNA database despite protections
Michael Fields, a detective from the Orlando Police Department, has revealed at a police convention that he secured a warrant to search the full GEDmatch database with over a million users. Legal experts told The New York Times that this appears to be the first time a judge has approved this kind of warrant. New York University law professor Erin Murphy even told the publication that the warrant is a "huge game-changer," seeing as GEDmatch restricted cops' access to its database last year. "It's a signal that no genetic information can be safe," the professor said.
[...] More importantly, its new policy only allows authorities to search for GEDmatch users who make their information available to the police. Users literally have to opt in -- their profiles are set to opt out by default. Company co-founder Curtis Rogers said only 185,000 users chose to opt in, but Fields' warrant allowed him to access all 1.3 million users' information. The detective said the service complied with the warrant within 24 hours, and while he hasn't made an arrest yet, he has already found some leads.
DNA policy experts are now worried that this development will encourage law enforcement to secure warrants for much larger databases. GEDmatch is smaller than its peers, since it doesn't offer its own testing kits: users have to upload their own DNA information in order to find relatives through its website.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @01:46AM (3 children)
Huh? WTF are you going on about? "Protection Policy?" "The might of arms?"
Are you sure you're posting in the right topic?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @01:56AM (2 children)
Maybe you're too dumb to see that any guarantees of "rights" and "protection" are completely non-existent. Kind of like https://www.xkcd.com/538/, [xkcd.com] but with legal protection instead of encryption.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @02:16AM (1 child)
Huh? You are apparently not bright enough to explain yourself clearly, so I'll ask again, what does the force of arms have to do with an overly broad search warrant?
Oh, and your link was incorrect. It should have been https://www.xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com] without the trailing comma. And you're welcome!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday November 08 2019, @07:37PM
That's just shorthand for "we hate the rule of law now."