The ethics of catching criminals using their family’s DNA

nature.com
A high-profile arrest in California shows how the long arm of the law can now extend into DNA databases to check for relatives.
Authorities search the home of a suspected killer

The use of ancestral DNA data to track a suspected murderer raises some troubling ethical questions.Credit: Rich Pedroncelli/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Last week’s arrest of a suspect in the Golden State Killer case in California has highlighted how DNA samples that have been volunteered for one purpose — in this case, genealogy — can be used for other reasons, often without the donor’s explicit consent. Several ethicists have expressed concern about US detectives using a genealogy website in this way. Coming so soon after the reuse of Facebook data in political campaigns in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s another example of how new technology and techniques lead to unexpected conundrums, and how ethical and societal debate must catch up. Tiếp tục đọc “The ethics of catching criminals using their family’s DNA”