US investigators recently tracked down the suspect of a 40-year-old murder case after uploading DNA to a genealogy website. Jordan Erica Webber weighs up the pros of finding ancestors with the cons of selling privacy

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A former police officer called Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested in April in connection with a series of murders, rapes and burglaries attributed to an unknown assailant known as the Golden State Killer.

This 40-year-old cold case was reopened after investigators acquired a discarded DNA sample and uploaded it to an “undercover profile” on a genealogy website called GED match. Through this, they were able to find distant relatives and eventually narrow down their search to match descriptions of the killer obtained throughout the investigation.

But what about the innocent people who sent off their DNA to a genealogy website in hopes of tracing their ancestry who might end up becoming part of a criminal investigation? Our DNA is one of the most inherently personal things we have, but this case raises questions about its privacy. If we spit into a test tube and send it off to a website for analysis, who owns that information? Who has access to it? And what can it be used for?

To try and answer some of these questions, Jordan Erica Webber talks to Prof Charles Tumosa of the University of Baltimore, Prof Denise Syndercombe-Court of King’s College and Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center.

Read Lee Rainie’s paper here.

Email the Chips team: chipspodcast@theguardian.com



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