DNA databases can send the police or hackers to your door....
DNA databases can send the police or hackers to your
door, study finds
"Genetic genealogy databases act like a GPS system
for anonymous DNA,” one researcher said.
by Maggie Fox / Oct.11.2018 / 2:27 PM PDT
More than 60 percent of Americans who have some European
ancestry can be identified using DNA databases — even if they have not
submitted their own DNA, researchers reported Thursday.
Enough people have done some kind of DNA test to make it
possible to match much of the population, the researchers said. So even if you
don’t submit your own DNA, if a cousin does, it could lead people to you.
They said their findings, published in the journal
Science, raise concerns about privacy. Not only could police use this
information, but so could other people seeking personal information about
someone.
Earlier this year, police said they used DNA from a public
database to catch former California police officer Joseph DeAngelo, suspected
of being the “Golden State Killer”.
A distant cousin had taken a commercial DNA sequencing
test, and those sequences were used to narrow the suspect list down to
DeAngelo.
DeAngelo was caught when police got DNA off a tissue he
threw into a trash can. It matched samples taken from the scenes of dozens of
rapes and murders across California.
Police are making use of this tool, the team at genealogy
website MyHeritage and at Columbia University in New York said.
“Between April to August 2018, at least 13 cases were
reportedly solved by long range familial searches,” they wrote.
“Most of these investigations focused on cold cases, for
which decades of investigation failed to identify the offender. Nonetheless,
one case involved a crime from April 2018, suggesting that some law enforcement
agencies have incorporated long-range familial DNA searches into active
investigations.”
Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer of MyHeritage, and
colleagues analyzed the DNA of 1.2 million people who had submitted their DNA
to MyHeritage for sequencing.
They were able to find third cousins or even closer
relatives for 60 percent of those with mostly European ancestry. They were able
to track relationships using publicly available genealogical records.
"Genetic genealogy databases act like a GPS system
for anonymous DNA,” Erlich said in a statement.
“The family trees set a coordinate system, in which the
DNA of each individual in these databases is like a beacon that illuminates
hundreds of the individual’s relatives who are not in the database,” he added.
“Therefore, even if a specific individual is not in these
databases, a relative of theirs could be, which is enough to identify them.”
It doesn’t take too many people to build up a database
that can track down relatives in the rest of the population, said geneticist
Shai Carmi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who worked on the study.
“We found that once a genetic database covers roughly 2
percent of the adult population, a match of a third cousin or closer is
expected for almost all persons of interest,” Carmi said in a statement.
Many more people than that have paid to have their DNA
sequenced.
“As of April 2018, more than 15 million people have
undergone direct-to-consumer autosomal genetic tests, with about 7 million kits
sold in 2017 alone,” the team wrote.
The team ran an experiment to see if they could identify
a theoretical person using DNA, genealogical information, and public
information such as age and addresses of people.
“We found that the suspect list can be pruned from basic
demographic information,” they wrote.
“Our simulations indicate that localizing the target to
within 100 miles will exclude 57 percent of the candidates on average,” they
wrote. Narrowing down the theoretical person’s age to within five years
excluded another 90 percent of possible matches, they said.
“Finally, inference of the biological sex of the target
will halve the list to just around 16 to 17 individuals, a search space that is
small enough for manual inspection,” they wrote.
“Moreover, the technique could implicate nearly any U.S.
individual of European descent in the near future.”
People of purely African and Asian descent are less
vulnerable because fewer people in those groups have had their DNA sequenced
and put into a public database.
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