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In this Friday, April 27, 2018 photo file, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who is the "Golden State Killer" responsible for at least a dozen murders and 50 rapes in the 1970s and 80s, is accompanied by Sacramento County Public Defender Diane Howard, right, during her arraignment in Sacramento County Superior Court in Sacramento, Calif. Authorities said they used a genetic genealogy website to link some crime-scene DNA to DeAngelo. (AP Photo / Rich Pedroncelli)
About 60 percent of the U.S. population can be identified from their DNA by searching consumer websites, even if they've never made their own genetic information available, a study estimates.
And that number will grow as more and more people upload their DNA to the web site. Science.
The use of such databases for criminal investigations made headlines in April, when they announced they'd used a genetic genealogy website to connect some crime-scene DNA to a man they were so accused of being so called Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer.
In general, such searches begin on a site by finding a relative linked to a DNA sample. Then there are more and more people in the world, public records and lists of survivors in obituaries, plus whatever they know about the DNA. They can build their own speculative family trees. Eventually, that can point to somebody else.
With DNA databases, "said Yaniv Erlich of Columbia University, an author of the study.
Each person in a DNA database acts "as a luminary," said Erlich, who is also chief scientific officer of the MyHeritage website.
His paper is focused on the subject of American descent, which makes it easier to find relative.
The researchers started the 1.28 million participants on the MyHeritage site at the time they did the work. Most had a northern European genetic background. For each, they looked for more distant cousins elsewhere in the database.
About 60 percent of the time, they found that they were at least equal to that of a third cousin, similar to the degree of relatedness that led to the suspect Golden State Killer. Third cousins share great-great-grandparents.
With some basic assumptions, they would be available for a criminal suspicion, the researchers calculated that they could make the initial identity of the person 16 or 17 people. That's limited enough that police could zero in with further investigation, Erlich said.
Erlich and his co-authors suggested that such research could be expanded in the near future. A database with DNA profiles of just 2 percent of a population is relatively close to a third cousin, researchers said. From that, they calculated that the genetic profiles of about 3 million Americans of European descent could provide the equivalent of a third cousin for more than 90 percent of that ethnic grouping.
Websites are getting close to that, said Erlich, noting that MyHeritage now has more than 1.75 million attendees. He said the website does not allow forensic searches.
Two DNA experts are identified to the study said third and fourth cousins can both lead to identifications.
In this Aug. 1, 2014 file photo, tools used for DNA testing are shown in a DNA lab at the Forensic Science Center of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation in Edmond, Okla. About 60 percent of the U.S. population can be identified from their DNA by searching consumer websites, even if they've never made their own genetic information available, a study estimates. That number will grow as more and more people upload their DNA. (AP Photo / Sue Ogrocki, File)
"Because of the difference between these distant cousins, it is more likely that the United States population is included," Graham Coop and Michael Edge of the University of California, Davis, wrote in a statement to The Associated Press.
"The fact that most suspects could be identified in this way is predictable" from mathematical calculations, and the new paper provides a convincing demonstration, they said.
However, the work raises important policy issues, they said. Should anyone other than law enforcement be allowed to conduct such searches? And should they be permitted?
"How should we react to the fact that the decisions of our fourth cousins, which one can never have, affect one's privacy?" they asked.
In an interview, Edge noted that when they add their DNA profiles to a publicly searchable genealogy site, "they're not necessarily thinking about the genetic privacy of their remote relative."
Amy McGuire, a professor of biomedical ethics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said that police searches using DNA and genealogy websites have been pointed to an incorrect person.
"You would hope … the victim of the false lead" by providing DNA, she said. "But you still have some invasion of that person's personal life by being investigated."
Some people would say that it's worth it to the cause of justice, but others "would find that very distressing," she added.
McGuire said there is an effective legal debate about whether it should be able to "go on a fishing expedition" using DNA genealogy websites without a warrant.
She recently published a survey that suggests the most people support the search for genetic genealogy databases. But support was much higher for investigations involving violent crimes and crimes against children than for nonviolent crimes.
Explore further:
Bioethicists suggest ethical considerations for forensic use of genetic data
More information:
Y. Erlich el al., "Identity inference of genomic data using family long-range searches," Science (2018). science.sciencemag.org/lookup/ … 1126 / science.aau4832
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