Posted on 10/12/2018 9:58:52 AM PDT by ETL
If you’re white, live in the United States, and a distant relative has uploaded their DNA to a public ancestry database, there’s a good chance an internet sleuth can identify you from a DNA sample you left somewhere. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that by combining an anonymous DNA sample with some basic information such as someone’s rough age, researchers could narrow that person’s identity to fewer than 20 people by starting with a DNA database of 1.3 million individuals.
Such a search could potentially allow the identification of about 60% of white Americans from a DNA sample—even if they have never provided their own DNA to an ancestry database. “In a few years, it’s really going to be everyone,” says study leader Yaniv Erlich, a computational geneticist at Columbia University.
The study was sparked by the April arrest of the alleged “Golden State Killer,” a California man accused of a series of decades-old rapes and murders. To find him—and more than a dozen other criminal suspects since then—law enforcement agencies first test a crime scene DNA sample, which could be old blood, hair, or semen, for hundreds of thousands of DNA markers—signposts along the genome that vary among people, but whose identity in many cases are shared with blood relatives. They then upload the DNA data to GEDmatch, a free online database where anyone can share their data from consumer DNA testing companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com to search for relatives who have submitted their DNA. Searching GEDMatch’s nearly 1 million profiles revealed several relatives who were the equivalent to third cousins to the crime scene DNA linked to the Golden State Killer. Other information such as genealogical records, approximate age, and crime locations then allowed the sleuths to home in on a single person.
Geneticists quickly speculated this approach could identify many people from an unknown DNA sequence. But to quantify just how many, Erlich and colleagues took a closer look at the MyHeritage database, which contains 1.28 million DNA profiles of individuals looking at their family history. (Erlich is chief science officer of the ancestry DNA testing company.) If you live in the United States and are of European ancestry, there’s a 60% chance you have a third cousin or closer relative in this database, the team projected. Their success rate was similar when they did searches for 30 random profiles in GEDmatch. (The odds drop to 40% for someone of sub-Saharan African ancestry in the MyHeritage database.)
Assuming you have a relative in one of these databases, what are the chances police could find you from an unidentified DNA sample, the way they nabbed the alleged Golden State Killer? To find out, Erlich and colleagues combined the MyHeritage database information with family trees, and demographic data such as rough age and likely geographic location. On average, that allowed them to use a hypothetical DNA sequence to home in on 17 “suspects” from a pool of about 850 people, the team reports today in Science.
GEDmatch likely only encompasses about 0.5% of the U.S. adult population, but millions of Americans are using DNA ancestry testing services. Once the GEDmatch figure rises to 2%, more than 90% of people of European descent will have a third cousin or closer relative and could be found in this way. “It’s surprising how small the database needs to be,” says population geneticist Noah Rosenberg of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved with the work.
Rosenberg and colleagues showed last year that a profile in a consumer DNA database can be matched up with the same person’s profile in law enforcement forensic DNA databases, even though they use a different, smaller set of DNA markers. Today in Cell, they report that more than 30% of individuals in the forensic databases can also be linked to a sibling, parent, or child in a consumer database. The two types of databases combined could make it even easier to find a suspect from a DNA sample. The linked consumer DNA profile could also reveal physical appearance or medical information for a criminal or their relatives, such as genes for eye color or a disease, even though the forensic databases aren’t supposed to contain that kind of information. “More can be done with them than has been claimed,” Rosenberg says.
Although these studies are encouraging news for solving crimes, they raise privacy concerns for law-abiding citizens, Erlich says. One possible solution suggested by his team is that the consumer DNA testing companies digitally encrypt a customer’s data and that GEDMatch only allow these encrypted files to be uploaded. That way a law enforcement agency couldn’t upload DNA sequence data from its own lab without an ancestry company’s cooperation. (The police can’t just pretend to be a customer and send crime scene DNA samples to companies like 23andMe because the company’s sequencing machines typically can’t process scant, degraded DNA samples.)
Erlich also thinks U.S. officials need to revisit federal rules protecting people who volunteer for research studies. A recently revised guideline for biomedical researchers, called the Common Rule, assumes that a research participant can’t easily be identified from their anonymized DNA profile. But in its paper, Erlich’s team used GEDMatch to identify a woman who was part of a study using her anonymized DNA profile and birth date, which is often publicly available to researchers.
Genetic policy experts agree that changes to how genealogy databases and DNA sequencing firms operate or are regulated are needed. The digital signature might be “a partial solution,” says law professor Natalie Ram of the University of Baltimore in Maryland. But all the players in the direct-to-consumer DNA sequencing industry would have to agree to this scheme, she notes. “If not, we’re back to square one.”
Instead, she and others recently argued in Science that states and Congress should pass laws limiting situations where law enforcement can use genealogy databases to find suspects. It may be reasonable for a murder case, but not for a petty crime, Ram says. “Finding the right balance is important.”
You have no basis in fact to make such a claim, and likely have no clue what constitutes evidence sufficient to issue an arrest warrant.
In order for me to be arrested there needs to be “probable cause” that I committed the crime in question. Unless it is a 100% match, DNA does not meet the probable cause criteria. Anything less than 100% completely exonerates me.
Seems like this is a mute point, pretty well set in cement, apart from a complete breakdown of society’s records. I guess we need to deal with it.
Yep. I’ve done it — solved two sealed adoptions that way.
“Yesterday, at our wonderful DMV, I had 3 electronic fingerprints of my right index finger. None of them worked.”
I’m younger but the machines didn’t work on me, either. I can’t use an iPhone because it doesn’t register my swipe. I tried the “use your thumb to ID you” on my iPad. No joy.
I am hypothyroid and my temperature is lower than “normal”. If I get to 98.6°, I have a temperature!
Between that and a lot of hours wearing off my prints on a keyboard, the last time I needed fingerprinting, when the machine didn’t work, they tried ink and paper. That wouldn’t produce clear prints either. They had to put some drops on my fingers that would raise the ridges, and then they could get prints.
They MUST have better machines now! In cop shows, they fingerprint corpses, so temperature must no longer be an issue.
“Anything less than 100% completely exonerates me.”
Tell it to the jury.
You seem to believe that DNA testing is perfect.
It’s never 100%. The more cops rely on database dragnets, the more of a problem there is going to be.
Here’s a paragraph from the article I linked to that might shed some light. The article is dense but you can get the gist of it:
“Consider, for example, the hypothetical cases illustrated in Table
1 in which the prior odds that the suspect is the source of an evidentiary
sample are 1:1000 and the random match probability is
one in one billion (109). If the probability of a false positive is
zero, then the posterior odds are a million to one in favor of the suspect
being the source, which certainly seems high enough to justify
confidence in that conclusion. In other words, the DNA evidence
has more than enough probative value to make up for the low prior
probability. However, if the false positive probability is even 1 in
10,000, the posterior odds in favor of the suspect being the source
are reduced drastically to only 10:1. It is very important for those
evaluating DNA evidence to understand that a false positive probability
on the order of 1 in 10,000, which may seem low enough to
be “safe,” may nevertheless undermine the value of a one-in-a-billion
DNA match sufficiently that, when combined with a low prior
probability, there is still room for doubt about whether the suspect
is the source of the matching sample.”
Sweet dreams.
So I’m supposed to worry about an extremely low probability of a false positive, combined with a crime scene that I have access to, combined with me having a motive to commit that crime and having some connection to the instruments used to commit that crime.
You’re right, this can and does happen to someone in this country, maybe even once a year. Odds one in 300+ million per year...yawn...it’s making me sleepy. Goodnight Honey...
I must admit, I did the ancestry.com DNA test.
And it provided me with a lot of insight about my family tree, which I’ve traced back to around the year 1000 in England.
But this price now?
Well, it is already done.
Wow. You and I must be related. I got that same email just the other day!
I had done a lot of genealogy and had traced relatives back to the UK, Jamestown, Mayflower and pre revolutionary war.
A sibling has a daughter really into genealogy, and the sib paid for a year of Ancestor.com and a DNA test as a gift to me, this past Christmas.
My wife and I are basically in our 80’s and our adult children are in their 50’s. So, we discussed if they were okay with me doing the DNA testing.
Everyone said to do it, and I did this spring. My DNA has identified a few hundred living cousins, which we knew nothing about.
In about 6 months, my ancestral DNA printout has shifted from a fairly wide balance to basically UK/Scotland/Ireland and North west Europe, mainly France, Germany and Switzerland. My DNA didn’t change, but the # of DNA donors @ Ancestry.com has increased in size. I don’t really understand this, but that is what Ancestor.com has told us.
The Goode Ship Lyon, Master and Captain William Pierce, 1630-1635.
Ufford arrived on the good ship Lyon in September 1632 and was met in Boston by Winthrop himself. Roger Terrill, a young 18 YO on the ship, married Ufford's daughter Abigail who was also on the trip (I wonder what REALLY happened on the voyage?).
They all went on with William Pynchon to found the city of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1636, and then found and settled the city of Milford in 1639. Here's a marker on their grave:
I should have said Milford, Connecticut. That was, in 1639, part of the New Haven colony and settled as a bulwark against the Dutch in New Amsterdam.
Thanks, we both have some good DNA from our ancestors.
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