Suppose your cousin leaves DNA evidence at a crime scene… and then police arrive at your door, because your DNA is similar to your cousin’s, and police found your DNA in a genealogical database. Does that seem like a good thing to you, or something from dystopian fiction?
If your DNA profile is in some database, this might happen. From jstor. A new kind of DNA evidence.
It was a high-profile crime in New York City—a jogger was murdered while running in a local park, and detectives had few leads. As the months passed and the crime remained unsolved, the victim’s family began pushing for wider use of familial DNA, or searching DNA databases for partial matches to DNA evidence that might represent a family member of the killer (the technique has been successfully used). Detectives eventually identified a suspect without it, but the idea of familial DNA testing is not going away. [continue]