this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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You are splitting hairs. Unless you took precautions to use a fake name and an untraceable email address, the police are showing up at your door. It's what they do.
Here's the gedmatch page describing their policy, and here's the screenshot they use to illustrate it:
![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/91d3c34a-5810-485c-aeb0-51d50f4be6b4.png)
"Public" is selected by default. Yeah yeah, they added "public opt-in" and "public opt-out" options in 2019 and forgot to update their screenshot, but I bet "public opt-in" is still selected by default. The NYT article says exactly that too. It is just untrue to call that "just untrue"! And can you guess what happened to all the people who uploaded their DNA data before 2019? Were all they automatically upgraded to "public opt-in"? I don't understand why you are so adamant to protect gedmatch saying "go ahead, upload your DNA freely!" when we know for sure that it was a free-for-all at least until 2019.
And you are still splitting hairs because you haven't refuted my main claim that police can get your data with a warrant. All that "opt-in/opt-out" is for the gedmatch's voluntary police information warrantless sharing program. I have seen no indication that gedmatch will not search the entire database for a match upon police request with a warrant. I have reason to believe that they will, because I know the state is sovereign. You cannot shield your information stored at third parties from government search just because you signed a privacy agreement with them.
The law of the state of Maryland, not the other 49 states. And I looked up the actual law, it doesn't actually say "opt-in" contrary to the news article description of it:
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/hb0240?ys=2021RS https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2021RS/Chapters_noln/CH_681_hb0240e.pdf
To me that sounds more like "providing a warning" than providing an "opt-in/opt-out" system. The "acknowledgment and consent" could be as simple as clicking "I agree to terms of service". Here's what gedmatch privacy policy says:
I am not a lawyer but to me that sounds like an explicit notice that law enforcement may get my data and satisfies the Maryland law requirement for a warrant. Specifically, gedmatch policy does not say they will ignore a warrant if you opt out. Again, my assertion is that the opt-in/opt-out system is for the voluntary warrantless information sharing system, and the warrants described in Maryland law are separate from that.
You also imply that 23andMe and ancestry.com do NOT share any information with law enforcement because they do not have an opt-in system. This is also false. Here's ancestry.com policy:
They WILL give up your DNA data to a valid warrant. The only question in my mind is whether they will also search the entire database for a given police sample. There is this article that says ancestry.com refused a police warrant in 2019 as improper, and police did not push the matter further. But it is unclear if ancestry.com was refusing to search its database on principle, or whether that one warrant in particular was faulty. Like if the police request "all 15 million DNA records" because they are idiots and don't know how databases work there is grounds to argue that is too broad of a request. But we don't have the text of the actual warrant. There are other articles that say police have been using specifically ancestry.com successfully to investigate crimes.
Someone would need to search the actual court cases where police used genealogy data to find suspects to confirm whether every single instance has used GEDMatch voluntary opt-in service, or whether police warrants have successfully retrieved match data from GEDMatch full database and from ancestry.com and 23andMe. I do not have such access.
EVEN IF ancestry.com and GEDmatch refuse warrants to search non-opt-in DNA in databases, such refusals have not yet been tested in court.
EVEN IF the Maryland law is amended/interpreted to mean that police cannot search non-opt-in DNA in databases even with a warrant (a voluntary restriction of the state on its own sovereign power, quite possible!), and EVEN IF the opt-in is made an explicit choice made in consultation with a "trained bioethicist" instead of an "I agree" checkbox below Terms of Service, and EVEN IF all other 49 states pass the same law as Maryland, it would STILL not be perfectly safe to upload your DNA to these services. Just as Maryland law changed in 2019, so it can change again. As we've seen with Roe v. Wade even long-established laws are not safe when there is a political interest to change them.
That is a very long email filled with a lot of waffle which is based on things you seem to be worried about due to not understanding the situation. I'm not helping you with everything but read what you're typing, you've put a post about needing explicit consent to use DNA and then made up a story that people can be tricked. Not how it works.
The screenshot you've found of Gedmatch isn't anything to do with police at all.
Finally, you've claimed I haven't answered the court case suggestion, which I did a message or two ago. If they have a case strong enough to get your DNA then they can get it from you. No need to go faffing about with websites.
To use genetic genealogy you need access to a database of users, each of those peoples data is protected and in order to use them each time you would need to make a valid case for each persons DNA. That means hundreds of thousands individual cases and you wouldn't get permission as theres no cause.