Home > News

At-Home DNA Kit Company Gave Data to FBI

By Laura Tucker
News Dna Kit Fbi Featured

Home DNA kits that can help you discover your family ancestry are popular now, with two of the most used being kits offered by ancestry.com and 23andme.com. The question is, what do these companies do with that personal data you’re handing them?

FamilyTreeDNA sold 1.5 million of these at-home DNA kits and then allowed the FBI to take a look at the data to solve crimes. Is that what these 1.5 million people signed up for when they spit into the tube?

FBI Exploits Home DNA Kit Data

Don’t get me wrong: I’m here to say there is great benefit in these kits, yet they’re being used in ways the public doesn’t realize.

I have a personal story that arose from the use of these kits. My sister tested her DNA, and ancestry.com notified her that she had a first cousin who had been adopted. This was a prior family secret no one had been aware of. The first cousin had been looking for family, and she found it in us. It’s been confirmed by the players in this story that she is our cousin.

We have met her in a tearful “reunion” and have more meetings planned with more cousins, aunts, uncles, and siblings. It’s a remarkable story.

Yet, attached to all those wonderful feelings is the question of what at-home DNA kit companies are doing with that data that is so wonderful in so many other ways.

The FBI contacted the president of FamilyTreeDNA, Bennett Greenspan, and told him his database could help solve heinous crimes. He wanted to upload the DNA data in two cases to see if there were genetic links to others to possibly generate some leads.

Greenspan knew this wasn’t what his customers had in mind when they spit in the tube, but one of the two cases involved the body of a dead child who had never been claimed. The other case was one of rape.

He said yes right away. “I have been a CEO for a long time,” said Greenspan. “I have made decisions on my own for a long time. In this case, it was easy. We were talking about horrendous crimes. So I made the decision.”

News Dna Kit Fbi Science

What to do with the DNA data resides with the companies themselves. There is no law behind what to do with this highly personal and highly identifiable data.

Law enforcement aren’t the only ones with an interest in this data. Drug companies and researchers would like to get their hands on it too. I’ll add that with ancestry.com, there’s a box to check asking if you consent to being connected to possible family members. Whether your information should be used by third parties is not mentioned.

That said, that company isn’t the one at the center of this story. The point is there is no law that governs what they do. They could do the same thing Greenspan did if they wanted but say they don’t.

“Taking a DNA test does not just tell a story about me. DNA tests inevitably reveal information about many other people, too, without their consent,” says Natalie Ram, associate professor of law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, studying genetic privacy.

“Should genetic databases be allowed to make up the rules as they go along?” she asks.

The dead-child case wasn’t solved by the way, but the FBI was able to determine the rape case was connected to the Golden State Killer who was arrested last year for murders and rapes that took place over decades.

Educate Yourself

23andMe, Ancestry, and MyHeritage say they do not share data unless required to by law, such as with a warrant or subpoena. But not every company has that same disclaimer as FamilyTreeDNA shows.

As great of an ending as my family story has, they aren’t always that way. Not everyone wants to be found, but sometimes they are through a family member. My uncle didn’t take this test; my sister did. Yet, now he knows what happened to the baby he walked away from in utero more than 50 years ago. Luckily, we rest knowing Ancestry won’t give our data away unless forced.

Have you taken a DNA test? What’s your story? Tell us in a comment below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.