You Can’t Hide Your Genes

The arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo as the suspected Golden State Killer has both thrilled and worried watchers. Bringing the Golden State Killer to justice is a victory for law enforcement and public safety. But with his identification through a publicly accessible genealogical DNA database, there are serious questions about who now is subject to genetic surveillance by the government, and not just by the online commercial services that sequence or store DNA data for genealogical research. These questions are all the more urgent as law enforcement investigators rush to implement similar tactics in other cases, like the search for the Zodiac Killer. As it turns out, millions more of us have our genetic information stored in a variety of genetic collections—including ones we may not even know about.

Lots of large collections of DNA-based information have been created for good reasons that have nothing to do with law enforcement. Cancer patients whose treatments depend on which specific genetic variations they possess and individuals seeking preconception genetic testing each have genetic data in their medical records. The advent...