Well, notice that the guy is at Brigham Young university, which is run by the Mormons, who are way in the forefront on population genetics. I think this is for religious reasons, they believe in post-mortem baptism, so are looking for ancestors to baptize.
I have a freebie genetics kit fom a Mormon group asking me to give them a DNA sample and my family tree -- several branches of which I can trace back ten, eleven, twelve generations, and pretty much every branch back to one country or another in Europe. But I wonder what else they'll do with it? Makes me just a tiny bit paranoid. If I give them a sample, who owns my DNA?
http://www.smgf.org
Correction, the main author is at Washington U. at St. Louis, it's the genetics computer program guys who helped him who are at Brigham Young.
Yeah, I had those same concerns -- but threw caution to the winds and submitted a sample anyway.
Baptism for the dead is done on the basis of written records, not DNA.
Your DNA that would be used for research, would not ever be used for any other purpose.
Now, if you have a relative who joined the church, they would be interested in your Family History.