## GEDmatch After the Case: Privacy in a New Context
The Golden State Killer case changed GEDmatch in ways that were not part of anyone’s plan when the investigation used it. Before the arrest, GEDmatch was a small genealogy platform known primarily to dedicated family history researchers. After the arrest, it was a subject of international news coverage and a focal point for debates about privacy, consent, and the appropriate scope of law enforcement access to consumer data.
The immediate aftermath of the arrest coverage was confusion and some alarm among GEDmatch users who had not expected their genetic data to be potentially accessible to law enforcement investigations. The site had not explicitly addressed law enforcement use in its terms of service; it had simply not anticipated it as a use case when the terms were written.
GEDmatch’s founders — Curtis Rogers and John Olson, the amateur genealogists who had built the site as a community resource — responded to the post-arrest attention with a statement that acknowledged the law enforcement use had occurred and that committed to a policy review. The review produced the May 2019 change to opt-in policy: law enforcement access became something users had to specifically enable, rather than something that applied by default to all uploaded profiles.
The policy change had a significant effect on the database’s law enforcement utility. When the default changed, the vast majority of GEDmatch users who had not thought about the law enforcement access question did not actively opt in. The portion of the database available for law enforcement searches dropped dramatically — from the full set of millions of profiles to a much smaller subset of users who had specifically chosen to allow that use.