“Genealogical DNA” has been in the news a lot lately! One of my biggest pet peeves about these articles (aside from the fact that that’s not what we call it (1)) is the fact that they mention databases that law enforcement isn’t even allowed to use. If I could make one request to the media, I would ask them not to talk about Ancestry at all. Don’t even say “ancestry-like” databases. The same goes for 23&Me, for that matter. Don’t even say databases “like” 23&Me. Don’t even mention 23&Me or Ancestry unless you are stating that these are databases that law enforcement is not allowed to use. Please do mention that there are two places where law enforcement is allowed to upload DNA for comparison, FTDNA and Gedmatch. It is important to get this right is because it lets people who are interested in opting in (2) know that they have to transfer their DNA to the companies that allow for law enforcement uploads. It also lets people who aren’t interested in opting in know where their DNA can be used.

Anytime I tell people this, the immediate reply is, what if the agency got a subpoena or warrant? This kind of question shows a fundamental misunderstanding about the process of Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy. This misunderstanding comes from the idea that if law enforcement is allowed to use a database, they have access to everything in that database. The reality is that once law enforcement submit a DNA profile to a database, what they get back in return is what everyone who submits their DNA to a database gets: an ethnicity estimate and a match list. This means that they can only see the people in the database who have opted in to law enforcement matching and are matches to the DNA they upload. The information that they are given about their matches is the same information everyone is given about their matches.

I wrote about the basics of how the process works in my post Solving for Myself (3). Looking at the match list is the first step. From this match list, we can derive family trees and hopefully find common ancestors between the matches, as well as union couples that unite the various family trees. From the union couples we build down until we find our person of interest.

So the answer to the question “what if a warrant were issued to access someone’s DNA on Ancestry?” is why? First, whose DNA would they be asking for, and what information would they be hoping to get from a singular DNA match? The power of Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy comes from a match list, not a singular DNA match.

Further, these questions are always asked as if Ancestry has not already answered them. Ancestry has a Guide for Law Enforcement (4) that states “Ancestry does not voluntarily cooperate with law enforcement.” They back up this statement with a Transparency Report (5) that is regularly updated (at the time of writing, the report covers up to June 30, 2022, but reports since 2015 are also available). It states that it has “received no valid requests for access to customers’ DNA data between January 1 and June 30, 2022,” and that it “received three valid law enforcement requests seeking non-DNA customer data related to criminal investigations involving alleged crimes, including credit card misuse, fraud, and/or identity theft. Ancestry did not provide any data in response to these requests” (emphasis mine) (6). No DNA data has been shared, and even in the case of non-DNA data, no information has been shared.

The argument I often hear in response is that due to the confidential nature of these types of requests, that Ancestry would not be allowed to tell us if our DNA data had been accessed. Yet in their Transparency Report, they state “As of June 30, 2022, Ancestry has never received a classified request.” (7)

Law enforcement is not using AncestryDNA.

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1. Jennifer Wiebe, “What’s in a name … et ça se traduit?,” Jennealogie (https://maltsoda.wordpress.com/2022/12/06/whats-in-a-name-et-ca-se-traduit/ : accessed 11 January 2023).
2. Jennifer Wiebe, “Opting In,” Jennealogie (https://maltsoda.wordpress.com/2021/01/11/opting-in/ : accessed 11 January 2023).
3. Jennifer Wiebe, “Solving for Myself,” Jennealogie (https://maltsoda.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/solving-for-myself/ : accessed 11 January 2023).
4. “Ancestry Guide for Law Enforcement,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.ca/c/legal/lawenforcement : accessed 11 January 2023).
5. “Ancestry Transparency Report,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.ca/c/transparency : accessed 11 January 2023).
6. Ancestry Transparency Report
7. Ancestry Transparency Report