New studies show how easy it is to identify people using genetic databases - STAT
▻https://www.statnews.com/2018/10/11/genetic-databases-privacy
n recent months, consumer genealogy websites have unleashed a revolution in forensics, allowing law enforcement to use family trees to track down the notorious Golden State Killer in California and solve other cold cases across the country. But while the technique has put alleged killers behind bars, it has also raised questions about the implications for genetic privacy.
According to a pair of studies published Thursday, your genetic privacy may have already eroded even further than previously realized.
In an analysis published in the journal Science, researchers used a database run by the genealogy company MyHeritage to look at the genetic information of nearly 1.3 million anonymized people who’ve had their DNA analyzed by a direct-to-consumer genomics company. For nearly 60 percent of those people, it was possible to track down someone whose DNA was similar enough to indicate they were third cousins or closer in relation; for another 15 percent of the samples, second cousins or closer could be found.
Yaniv Erlich, the lead author on the Science paper, said his team’s findings should prompt regulators and others to reconsider the assumption that genetic information is de-identified. “It’s really not the case. At least technically, it seems feasible to identify some significant part of the population” with such investigations, said Erlich, who’s a computer scientist at Columbia University and chief science officer at MyHeritage.
The Science paper counted 12 cold cases that were solved between April and August of this year when law enforcement turned to building family trees based on genetic data; a 13th case was an active investigation.
The most famous criminal identified this way: the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California with a series of rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s. With the help of a genetic genealogist, investigators uploaded a DNA sample collected from an old crime scene to a public genealogy database, built family trees, and tracked down relatives. They winnowed down their list of potential suspects to one man with blue eyes, and in April, they made the landmark arrest.
To crack that case, the California investigators used GEDmatch, an online database that allows people who got their DNA analyzed by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry to upload their raw genetic data so that they can track down distant relatives. MyHeritage’s database — which contains data from 1.75 million people, mostly Americans who’ve gotten their DNA analyzed by MyHeritage’s genetic testing business — works similarly, although it explicitly prohibits forensic searches. (23andMe warns users about the privacy risks of uploading their genetic data to such third party sites.)
“For me, these articles are fascinating and important and we shouldn’t shy away from the privacy concerns that these articles raise. But at the same time, we should keep in mind the personal and societal value that we believe that we are accruing as we make these large collections,” said Green, who was not involved in the new studies and is an adviser for genomics companies including Helix and Veritas Genetics.
He pointed to the potential of genomics not only to reunite family members and put criminals behind bars, but also to predict and prevent heritable diseases and develop new drugs.
As with using social media and paying with credit cards online, reaping the benefits of genetic testing requires accepting a certain level of privacy risk, Green said. “We make these tradeoffs knowing that we’re trading some vulnerability for the advantages,” he said.
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