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IPFS News Link • Police State

Police can request your DNA without your knowledge or consent via ancestry websites

• https://www.rt.com

If you're suspected of a crime police can, if they have a warrant, request access to your DNA profile from both the Ancestry and 23andMe websites. The latter has received five requests for customer information from law enforcement, although the company says it didn't comply with any of these requests.

"As the 5 requests resulting in zero information provided indicates, we resist all of these requests. For perspective, 5 requests with over 3 million customers is 0.0002% worth of requests in 11 years. That's less than rare," 23andMe spokesman Andy Kill told RT.com.

Though the company hasn't ruled out providing information to authorities in the future. "We would always review a request and take it on a case-by-case basis," privacy officer Kate Black told told WJAX on Thursday.

Ancestry.com, however, has complied with such requests. Of the nine made by authorities for customer info in 2016, the company provided information in eight of the cases, according to the company's transparency report.

However, the company stressed to RT.com that these requests were not related to DNA profiles rather "they were all with regards to things like account data that could be useful in credit card fraud investigations."


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