More than a year after the GSK apprehension through genetic genealogy, the feds are finally moving and looking closely at what’s been going on, New federal rules limit police searches of family tree DNA databases:

The DOJ interim policy, which takes effect on 1 November, is intended to “balance the Department’s relentless commitment to solving violent crime and protecting public safety against equally important public interests,” such as privacy and civil liberties, a press release states. The policy says “forensic genetic genealogy” should generally be used only for violent crimes such as murder and rape, as well as to identify human remains. (The policy permits broader use if the ancestry database’s policy allows such searches.) Police should first exhaust traditional crime solving methods, including searching their own criminal DNA databases.

These guidelines are baby steps. They don’t impact people working in the private sector. But likely they presage more fully-fleshed responses.

One consideration is that when thinking about the intersection of genealogy and forensics we often view the latter as a black-box, with reliable technology and data. The reality is that degraded samples are not as easy to work with, and extracting information is not trivial. Because of this variation in quality, it seems possible that unless there is some self-regulation, eventually the government will exhibit greater and greater oversight on this space due to its relevance to law enforcement. There have already been enough scandals with conventional government forensic labs.

This is on my mind after a conversation with my friend David Mittelman. He founded Othram last year. It is one of the few companies that actually operate a lab targeting this space. He is very concerned about companies that sell lab services without operating a lab since they have no visibility on the data generation. He has suggested the community builds tools like Genome-in-a-Bottle to help self-regulate and verify that labs can do what they claim they can do. Obviously his interest is simple: excessive regulation on the private sector is not good for business, so he prefers that firms just get ahead of concerns and be transparent.

If genetics doesn’t self-regulate, the government surely will.