This raised a question for investigators working on other cold cases where genealogy database searching might be useful: the database they had available to search was now a different database from the one that had been available when the Golden State Killer case used it. The investigative opportunity that the case had exploited was, in a specific sense, narrower after May 2019 than it had been before.
The acquisition of GEDmatch by Verogen in December 2019 added another dimension to the site’s transformation. Verogen is a company specifically focused on forensic DNA analysis. The acquisition brought a genealogy platform built by amateur genealogists for family history research under the ownership of a company whose business is forensic work. The institutional character of the database changed, which had implications for how its users understood what the database was and what it was for.
The Florida warrant of November 2019 — which required GEDmatch to provide law enforcement access to its full database, overriding the opt-in system — illustrated that the opt-in policy did not eliminate the possibility of compelled law enforcement access. A court order could override the platform’s policy. Users who had not opted in could not rely solely on that choice as protection against their data being searched.
These developments did not reverse the Golden State Killer investigation’s use of the database. The investigation used what was available at the time, under the terms that then applied. But they illustrate the degree to which the case’s resolution changed the context in which future uses of similar methods would occur.