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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Ancestry declined to give law enforcement access to its DNA database, the company said Tuesday.
Ancestry received a request from law enforcement to access its genetic database in 2019, but the company said no, according to a transparency report released in late January. The warrant, reported earlier on Monday by Buzzfeed, came from a court in Pennsylvania, but the DNA analysis company said it was improperly served. The warrant could have let law enforcement officers have access to 16 million DNA profiles from the company's customers.
The transparency report comes at a time when law enforcement agencies around the country have cracked dozens of murder, rape and assault cases, some from decades ago, using a technique called genetic genealogy. The practice relies on investigators having access to a large cache of DNA profiles, and raises concerns among privacy watchdogs.
An Ancestry spokesperson said in a statement that the company hasn't received any followup since it fought the warrant. The company said it declined law enforcement access to its database as part of its larger commitment to user privacy.
"Not only will we not share customer information with law enforcement unless compelled to by valid legal process, such as a court order or search warrant, we will also always advocate for our customers' privacy and seek to narrow the scope of any compelled disclosure, or even eliminate it entirely," the spokesperson said.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday February 05 2020, @04:45PM
If there weren't such a huge pool of idiots willing to submit their samples without demanding proper protections for their data, then proper protections would have been built *before* the database grew to become such a big target.
But since so many people happily submit to this without demanding real protections, the database now exists, and it WILL be misused. And there's no opportunity to improve the situation. The testing companies have no real incentive to do anything different. They can figure out who the sane people are by trawling their database of suckers for close relatives. And even if we patch the problem with a law now that would let people claw their samples back, get them deleted from the database, it won't matter. Because those databases have now been copied several times, the original company that collected the data doesn't have the only copy of the data, even if they delete it everyone is still screwed.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?