And it states that investigators may only use websites with strict policies around user consent.
The law dictates it must have an opt in policy, so DNA being accessed is from volunteers basically.
It's also worth noting that if they had your DNA there's no need to steal your pizza because that will just provide the same DNA.
It's also discussing a Maryland law where prosecuters there have to apply to use those volunteers and have a certain level of crime to do so. In other states they can access the volunteers with less hoops to jump through. Nobody can access non volunteers.
On the 'turned on by default' statement, that's just untrue. It was never an opt out policy, it started as an open access arrangement then after legal challenges it became an opt in policy. You can look that up.
Now another misconception that I've noticed is what Gedmatch is, you can't submit spit to Gedmatch, it's a site for people who have tested at other sites to upload their DNA file to compare against other users of the site.
ETA - There's also no addresses on Gedmatch, the police would email you and ask for your details. You can submit addresses to Ancestry for example if you want, but there's no requirement to, or for that matter your name, email, etc etc. In cases currently being worked on they have had leads closed because people won't reply to a message.
You're getting a bit confused here. Gedmatch cooperates with law enforcement but it's only if you've chosen to, so it's a program you need to opt in to. This is legal.
Some of what you've found is about how the police use DNA in general, for example going into bins to get you or your relatives DNA, this is unrelated to genetic genealogy and has been done for decades.
Now one thing that could happen is police requesting your DNA by court order, this is already done, not through genetic genealogy though, they can just get it from you. If the police get a court order to obtain your DNA then they're swabbing you themselves, or as previously mentioned, just getting it from your bin.
Police can not request everyones DNA by court order. That's not how laws work, and if they wanted to use genetic genealogy privately then they'd need access to the entire database, millions of people in dozens of countries, and each one would need to be requested individually with a full case to obtain. That's impossible.
Police do have their own database of DNA they've legitimately obtained, it's called CODIS. This can be used to find close relatives, so if your brother was arrested for a robbery and had his DNA collected, then your DNA was found in a murder scene they could link it to your brother using CODIS.
The Golden State Killer was caught after police detectives uploaded his DNA to a personal genomics website in 2017 pretending it was theirs.
That's untrue. They uploaded it to Gedmatch which is the one website that allows these things. They didn't 'pretend it was theirs', they legitimately uploaded it from a police account. They do this a lot but you need to opt in now due to the legal challenges. They've solved quite a few crimes and identified many unidentified bodies, including a number of murdered children.
If it happened you could delete your data. I think it's unlikely though, as a for profit company they'd close down pretty quickly if they allowed it and people stopped buying.
Most companies don't cooperate with law enforcement, it's only Gedmatch who do currently and you need to personally opt in to that because they originally gave free access and there was a legal challenge. None will give info to health insurance companies, privacy laws in most places wouldn't allow that. All of them have to let you delete your info whenever you want.
However if you don't trust for profit orgs then you're out of luck. Many of them are run by the LDS though, and their goal is to get your family tree so that they can baptise your dead relatives, so like, kinda harmless as far as corporate strategy goes.
I've had mine done and nobody has made an evil clone to frame me for killing the king yet, so it's not too bad.
As much as your relatives might like the kittens, they do need vet care. Fleas can kill kittens quite easily and you might lose all of them, bathing them can also kill them.
Either you take them yourself or try to find a rescue who can. They can safely treat the family and check that they're OK outside of this issue.
You absolutely could, but that feels weird after you've kinda just met. It's not like having a one to one chat with people, I think there was like 15 or 20 people?
I've been in a few for various reasons. There's one where they choose a few redditors at random and you get 7 days to talk amongst yourselves, after that you are banned from the sub forever. That was amusing. Kinda gutting when you get the ban notification.