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Notes -
Are there any good discussions on the ethics of using public genealogy databases to catch criminals? The idea of using a 23andMe or Ancestry.com database to test against DNA left at a crime scene went mainstream a few years ago when police used a public database to find and track the Golden State Killer. Now, police from Moscow, Idaho have done it again in tracking Bryan Kohberger, who is accused of killing four University of Idaho students:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/idaho-murder-suspect-arrest-genealogy-b2254498.html
I am a bit conflicted on how I feel about this. On the one hand, obviously the police should do everything in their power to catch murderers. But there is a certain amount of dystopian doom in being able to access such a database. The problem is you don't even need to have your DNA uploaded to the database for the cops to find you. A fourth or fifth cousin's DNA gives the police enough information to create a family tree and zero in on a particular suspect.
I have a couple problems with this, the first of which is that it doesn't seem like it should be legal that the government essentially can track me by my DNA without any sort of consent. The second problem I have is that DNA evidence is not nearly as reliable as people seem to think. Hair and touch DNA are constantly contaminating crime scenes. Hairs can be picked up anywhere, from the police who investigate the scene, to techs, to medical examiners, to the bodies of the victims themselves. Granted this is not as applicable if the suspect's blood is at the scene, but nevertheless, DNA evidence is not foolproof, yet juries seem to convict as if it is.
I tend to lean a bit more anti-authoritarian, so perhaps this is my own personal bias, but it seems we need to regulate this type of DNA testing.
I think that it might be helpful to consider how we would respond to the development of a different high-tech tool: A time machine. Suppose several people commit a crime, and one is arrested. The police don't know who is accomplices were. So, they jump in their time machine and go get a warrant to tap the arrestee's phone in the days before the event, so they can see who his accomplices are. Then, they go back to the present and arrest the accomplices. That does not seem to be problematic, from a privacy point of view.
Yet, if police effectively go back in the past by getting a warrant to read the accomplice's past texts, people get very upset. Why? They seem to me to be functionally identical.
It seems to me that people are conflating collecting data with *looking at *data. Collecting data about me -- whether that be my texts or my DNA or whatever -- does not harm me. The harm only comes if someone examines that data to learn something private about me, such as my risk for cancer, or what have you (similarly, the government collects my garbage every week. But it they start searching my garbage to find out details about my private life, I have a problem with that, the Supreme Court notwithstanding.
So, do I have a problem with the govt creating a DNA database? Not really. Do I have a problem if the govt examines my DNA to discover private facts about me? Yes. But using 23andMe to find suspects is not the govt trying to find private facts about me; it is about the govt trying to find out who left a particular piece of evidence at the scene. Years ago, when a friend got married, he gave the best man and groomsmen custom baseball bats with the wedding date, etc, on them. If one was used to murder a victim, and the police asked my friend for a list of all of the groomsmen, would that be an outrage? It would not. How is it different if the perpetrator leaves DNA, rather than a distinctive baseball bat, at the scene? It isn't. As long as the police 1) get a warrant; and 2) do not use the DNA to snoop into whatever intimate info that DNA might reveal about the people involved, there is no problem.
If one's DNA is public information (and I'd argue it almost always is. People leave it everywhere), then I don't think it makes sense to classify any inferred facts from it as intimate/private. Saying that analysis of public information crosses a line into an invasion of privacy rubs me the wrong way, though it's difficult to articulate why.
Like, if Sherlock Holmes makes brilliant, true deductions about someone based on the smallest details, he has not really violated their privacy, even if they'd preferred to keep those facts to themselves.
Unlike Sherlock's deductions, "Mr. Smith has dna associated with having a micropenis" is a fact, not a deduction. And, Sherlock famously made his deduction based on evidence that everyone else can see. In contrast, though I can get a sample of your dna from your coffee cup or whatever, can't analyze it. In that sense the information in your DNA isnot publicly available.
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