The change in GEDmatch’s policy came about a year after DeAngelo’s arrest and was explicitly a response to the public attention generated by the case. It represented a significant shift in the database’s law enforcement accessibility: from a situation where all uploaded profiles were potentially comparable against crime-scene DNA, to one where only those users who specifically consented were included in law enforcement searches.
In December 2019, Verogen, a forensic DNA company, acquired GEDmatch. The acquisition shifted the site from its volunteer-run origins to a commercial entity with an explicit forensic focus. The basic genealogy tools remained available to general users, but the institutional context of the database changed.
In November 2019, a Florida court had issued a warrant requiring GEDmatch to provide access to its entire database for a specific criminal investigation. At the time the warrant was served, only about 185,000 of the site’s approximately 1.3 million users had opted in to law enforcement access. The warrant overrode the opt-in system and produced access to profiles that had not been consented to law enforcement use. The Florida warrant episode illustrated the tension between the policy framework GEDmatch had tried to establish after the Golden State Killer case and the legal authority of courts to compel access in specific investigations.
Ethics, Privacy, and the Questions the Case Raised
The legal and ethical questions generated by the investigative genetic genealogy method in the Golden State Killer case extended well beyond the case itself, and they have not been fully resolved in the years since the arrest.