Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

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>It's not like there's someone out there using this information to frame other people of crimes they didn't do.

pretty bold claim -- as with any additional justice element the innocent will be trampled to some degree.

Here's the thing : it doesn't just open up criminals for prosecution, it also opens up the 23andme population to an even larger arrangement of possibilities for self-incrimination and 'incorrect or misdirected pursuits of justice'.

It's nice that a well known murderer was found out, but the reality of the situation is that we likely wouldn't hear very loudly the stories of innocent folks with cases mishandled by a law enforcement bureaus that were enabled by 23andme or similar services. It looks bad on the law enforcement agencies and it looks bad for the corporation.

This argument can be generalized against anything police or prosecutors use to convict people. Fingerprints can falsely implicate someone in a crime. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. If we allow prosecutors to present fingerprints or witness testimony as evidence, innocent people will sometimes get convicted. The most effective way to minimize false convictions is to never convict anyone.

>pretty bold claim

I don't think so. How would that even work? It's not much different from framing someone of a crime just by knowing their blood type.

>we likely wouldn't hear very loudly the stories of innocent folks with cases mishandled by a law enforcement bureaus that were enabled by 23andme or similar services

Nah. Let's suppose that someone made a typo and Mr. Buttle is accused of committing the crime Mr. Tuttle, who deposited his genetic material, committed. While the Buttle-genome link is a useful piece of evidence, it's on the judge to request a saliva sample from Mr. Buttle to ensure a trustworthy source of information. If he doesn't, well, it sucks for Mr. Buttle that he got a lazy judge, but it's not on the company. The person who wrote down the name could not have known that information would at some later point be misused to lockup an innocent man.

In this case Mr Buttle would just need to get genotyped again to prove his innocence.

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