Photo : Jacob Langston ( Getty )

Law enforcement and genetic genealogists didn’t waste any time after public DNA databases led to the Golden State Killer suspect last month. A forensics company announced a service to do this analysis en masse, and the DNA database GEDmatch has already changed its privacy policy to allow for its use by law enforcement. Remember, even if you’re not in these databases, your cousins probably are.


The forensics company, Parabon NanoLabs, told Buzzfeed they had uploaded about 100 crime scene samples to GEDmatch in search of culprits and unidentified victims of crimes. Their service takes samples provided by law enforcement and processes the DNA in a way similar to what 23andMe and Ancestry do. The result is a data file that they can upload to GEDmatch.


GEDmatch is popular among people studying their family trees and adult adopted children looking for their birth parents. You upload your data file from a testing service, and the system helps you find other people whose DNA matches yours. It’s a small database, so it’s unlikely you’ll get a direct hit, but chances are you’ll at least find a few distant cousins to help narrow down your search.

There are other DNA databases, too, and it’s a safe bet that law enforcement and forensics companies are pursuing similar strategies wherever they can.

What’s Next

A hundred samples in a month is nothing. If this technique works, it seems likely to become routine for police departments across the country. GEDmatch recently updated its policy to explicitly allow law enforcement to search the database, with a few restrictions:

When you upload Raw Data to GEDmatch, you agree that the Raw Data is one of the following: Your DNA;

DNA of a person for whom you are a legal guardian;

DNA of a person who has granted you specific authorization to upload their DNA to GEDmatch;

DNA of a person known by you to be deceased;

DNA obtained and authorized by law enforcement to either: (1) identify a perpetrator of a violent crime against another individual; or (2) identify remains of a deceased individual;

An artificial DNA kit (if and only if: (1) it is intended for research purposes; and (2) it is not used to identify anyone in the GEDmatch database); or

DNA obtained from an artifact (if and only if: (1) you have a reasonable belief that the Raw Data is DNA from a previous owner or user of the artifact rather than from a living individual; and (2) that previous owner or user of the artifact is known to you to be deceased). ‘Violent crime’ is defined as homicide or sexual assault.

However, GEDmatch can change the policy at any time.

On the one hand, it’s pretty cool that murderers and rapists can be brought to justice, and families can get closure on their missing loved ones. On the other, I never agreed to put my DNA in a law enforcement database—but now snippets of it are probably already there thanks to third or fourth or fifth cousins who had no idea their Ancestry file would ever be used this way.

