Family Tree DNA, previously blasted for secretly working with the FBI, now openly advertises law enforcement ties
Family Tree DNA is now openly advertising their law enforcement ties and encouraging customers to help them solve crimes.
DNA has been all the rage over the last several years, and Black consumers in particular, have rushed to companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe to find out more about where they’re ancestors came from. But people may want to think twice before handing over DNA samples in the future.
Family Tree DNA was outed by Buzzfeed earlier this year for secretly working with the FBI, essentially allowing federal law enforcement access to their users’ DNA without their customers’ consent or knowledge. Though the company did come under fire after the incident, it would seem that instead of doing damage control, they are using the controversy to their advantage.
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According to The Atlantic, Family Tree DNA recently launched a whole campaign around what can be categorized as white fear to get support of their desire to use your DNA to help law enforcement catch criminals. With the help of Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted in 2003 and later escaped her abductor, Family Tree is encouraging consumers to send in their DNA to help catch people like the man that took Smart. And surprisingly, a lot of people support this.
Though DNA testing companies have resisted law enforcement, according to the Atlantic, a poll of 639 genealogists by Maurice Gleeson last year found that 85 percent were “reasonably comfortable” with law enforcement using platforms like GEDmatch to identify serial rapists and killers. A different study at Baylor found that of the 1,587 respondents, 91 percent supported forensic genealogy for violent crimes and 46 percent for non-violent crimes.
With high profile cases like the Golden State Killer case, which turned up a suspect after several decades using a DNA website, it would be no surprise that more and more people would begin to support law enforcement using your DNA to find relatives who might be criminal suspects.
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The Atlantic reported that a woman in Washington state recently found out her DNA on GEDMatch led to the arrest of her second cousin twice removed for murder in Iowa. Her brother had worried about getting a family member arrested before she shared her DNA, but she would later say that she was “OK about it. I want someone to have to do time if [he/she] did something like that. I don’t regret it now.”
There is no telling what the future will hold if law enforcement can casually have access to anyone’s DNA and if white victims can head campaigns appealing to a demographic that the Atlantic described as often overly representative of white, usually female, victims, but with mass incarceration and racial profiling to think about, Black consumers have serious considerations to ponder about using such services.
