Gene pattern research prompts privacy concerns; Stanford Daily, May 19, 2017

Elise Most, Stanford Daily; 

Gene pattern research prompts privacy concerns

"Professor of Biology and senior author of the paper Noah Rosenberg was able to match over 90 percent of datasets comprised of 13 genetic markers to sets of 642,563 markers in which the sets of 13 were not included.

CODIS, or the what the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) describes as its “program of support for criminal justice DNA databases,” formerly depended on these 13 markers before recently converting to a 20-marker system. The researchers reached 99 percent accuracy when they used datasets of 30 genetic markers.

Although these findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may assist wildlife researchers or archaeologists dealing with incomplete sets of DNA, Rosenberg told Stanford News that the results also have consequences for laws and practices surrounding genetic privacy."