I’m going from Hong Kong to Iceland next month. I’ve read that everything there, including food, are quite expensive. So my wife and I have been researching on how to prepare meal or snack that we can eat during the day instead of going to restaurant....
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.
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.
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.
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.
During travel, what can I prepare beforehand as meal, which can be eaten without access to fire or microwave?
I’m going from Hong Kong to Iceland next month. I’ve read that everything there, including food, are quite expensive. So my wife and I have been researching on how to prepare meal or snack that we can eat during the day instead of going to restaurant....
Are any of the DNA testing companies trustworthy?
So obviously we’re all on Lemmy for a complicated combination of reasons, but we all likely share some common ground, namely…...