In November 2019, a Florida court issued a warrant requiring GEDmatch to provide law enforcement access to its full database, overriding the opt-in system for a specific criminal investigation. The warrant illustrated that the opt-in policy did not eliminate the possibility of compelled access. Users who had not opted in could not rely solely on that choice as protection against their data being searched in response to a court order.
These developments did not reverse the Golden State Killer investigation’s use of the database. The investigation used what was available at the time. But they illustrate how the case’s resolution changed the context for future applications of the method.
## The Ongoing Ethical Debate
The ethical debate about investigative genetic genealogy has not been resolved, and the success of the Golden State Killer case does not resolve it. The success of the method in producing identifications in serious crimes is real and relevant. But success in producing identifications does not, by itself, settle the questions about consent and privacy.
The core ethical tension is between two legitimate values: using available tools to identify people responsible for violent crimes, and protecting individuals’ genetic privacy and their control over how their biological information is used.
The argument for the method, stated at its strongest, is that violent crimes cause serious and irreversible harm to real people; that society has an interest in identifying and holding responsible those who commit such crimes; and that a method using genetic data to produce investigative leads, without directly implicating the database users whose data is used, is a proportionate tool in service of a legitimate aim. The distant relatives whose profiles appeared in the Golden State Killer database search were not harmed by the search, were not made public, and were not treated as suspects.