Forget privacy. What about unlawful search and seizure? Or how about habeas corpus? Presumption of innocence? The entirety of Western jurisprudence rests on these pillars.
Warrantlessly perusing DNA databases (of non-LEO entities) is at the very least a grey area, if not blatantly unlawful.
How? Do the police need a warrant to look at the pictures you upload to Facebook? What about if you put your DNA profile up on a giant billboard (GCAGC....), do they need a warrant to look at the billboard? It's illegal for them to come and take your DNA out of your body, but if you just upload it to some website for freely compare against and/or download, you are giving everyone permission to compare against it or download it.
I would never upload my DNA profile, but I have relatives who do. So I am not broadcasting the info, but other family members may.
I am generally alright with law enforcement using public information like this, but it could be used against me without me ever making said data public. So I find your argument invalid.
So lets say the police see your brother, and realize he looks suspiciously like a criminal they are looking for, so they come find you.
Your argument is that your brother's appearance can be used against you without you ever going outside, so it should be illegal for the police to look at people.
I'm a huge privacy advocate, but I don't think DNA should be private. DNA database tech is a game changer and I absolutely support it being used to solve crimes.
* DNA is immutable, comparable, heritable, and searchable in a tree. It's an ideal lookup key. Unlike fingerprints or face data you don't even need direct DNA evidence. A relative will do.
* It doesn't invade privacy to look this up in a database. No homes were entered into, no phone conversations were tapped. Private lives weren't snooped. No relatives were harmed.
* If you commit a violent crime, bad on you. If you leave DNA behind, you're stupid. The first deserves punishment; taken together doubly so.
* DNA evidence alone may not be enough to convict, but it can be the basis for an investigation.
* We already use video footage and artist sketches. Right now we rely on the "database" of collective human consciousness to find matches, which is unreliable and imperfect. When matches are found it's simply luck or chance -- cases shouldn't have to depend upon that when it's the same class of evidentiary data.
I'd be in favor of the government having all of our DNA on file so long as it isn't used for discriminatory purposes (health insurance, job, organ transplant denial, ...) or for advertising to us.
We're only scratching the surface of what's possible, though. Imagine when we extract higher dimensional features, such as gender, race, hair color, and ultimately facial structure from the DNA. Feed that into a photo database...
Your phenotype and genotype != your private life. Even if we aren't happy with what we got, these are the most concrete representations of our own selves. It's our code and (usually) unique addressing label, independent of any database. We should view it as such.
You're shedding DNA right now through exfoliation, waste elimination, and breathing. You can almost be guaranteed that corporate interests will start tapping into these sources in the next few decades. The law enforcement use case at least seems legitimate.
>If you commit a violent crime, bad on you. If you leave DNA behind, you're stupid. The first deserves punishment; taken together doubly so.
You aren't more deserving of punishment for being stupid. What kind of insane moral system do you follow?
>You're shedding DNA right now through exfoliation,
And I'd prefer that law enforcement not be able to track me everywhere I go because the risk of getting caught up in an investigation is too high.
The criminal justice system has serious flaws and I'd rather not be wrongly implicated just because I happened to shed DNA near where a crime happened.
> You aren't more deserving of punishment for being stupid.
I was being tongue in cheek. Punishments should fit crimes and those accused should not be judged on the basis of intelligence, race, wealth, or any other factor but the facts of their case. That said, it's easy to prosecute cases with abundant evidence available. Such crimes tend not to be premeditated, and easy convictions serve as social reenforcement to deter similar crimes.
> The criminal justice system has serious flaws and I'd rather not be wrongly implicated just because I happened to shed DNA near where a crime happened.
Fair point.
DNA should be used to place persons at crime scenes and not be used in absence of additional evidence. Unless said DNA was found on the victim of a sex crime, under fingernails, etc.
There's barr bodies, chimerism, all kinds of mutation - missense, nonsense, point deletes, repeats -, there's somatic recombination, slipping of strands, transposomes, polyploidy... you name it.
But I think talking at this level ignores the science and overwhelming statistics of SNP databases. You're not going to move around within the database over time.
Theres a difference between a warrantless home aearch and the police investigating your house based on probable cause established via a picture of illegal activity published by your cousin in the newspaper
Have you ever heard the statistic that there are over 200,000 unsolved murders in the past 40 or so years? In the U.S.? This means that there are a lot of serial killers out there -- one page estimates 2,000 -- not to mention the relatively-banal one-and-done murderers.
Police already rarely run DNA tests on existing convicts, so I'm fairly sure they would not view it as a prestigious apppointment to work all day every day to grind through several tens of thousands of new DNA tests just to upload them to GEDMatch...for a chance at a hit on someone who hasn't already been convicted, who isn't already scheduled to be executed, or who has already been executed.
Long story short: you're talking about something that is easy to ask, but is a massive undertaking.
Warrantlessly perusing DNA databases (of non-LEO entities) is at the very least a grey area, if not blatantly unlawful.