FamilyTreeDNA will let users block law enforcement from accessing data after report found the company gave the FBI access; EU users are automatically opted out
Adam Vaughan / New Scientist :
Context & Ripple Effects
The opt-out follows February's disclosure that FamilyTreeDNA was working with the FBI and letting agents search its 1M+ DNA profiles without users being asked first — a move that put it ahead of rivals like Ancestry and 23andMe, which had only faced individual law-enforcement data requests back in 2015 rather than an open search arrangement. The industry's earlier response, a voluntary 2018 pledge by Ancestry and 23andMe to be upfront about third-party sharing that carried no enforcement mechanism, left consent terms entirely at each company's discretion.
First-order effects
- Existing FamilyTreeDNA customers gain a switch to block law-enforcement searches of their profiles, while new EU users are excluded from such access automatically — reflecting GDPR-era consent expectations rather than US ones.
Second-order effects
- Ancestry and 23andMe face pressure to match explicit opt-out controls or explain why their voluntary transparency pledge stops short of one, since FamilyTreeDNA has converted a privacy liability into a product feature.
Third-order effects
- With researchers showing that 60% of Americans of European descent are identifiable through public DNA databases whether or not they ever submitted a sample individual opt-outs alone cannot contain re-identification risk, the gap between company-level consent settings and systemic exposure points toward binding rules — a direction the DoJ's interim policy limiting law enforcement's use of genealogy databases effective November 1, 2019 begins to formalize.
The trend: Consumer genomics is moving from discretionary, company-by-company data-sharing policies toward formalized consent controls and government-set limits on law-enforcement access.