Information created will always be prone to acquisition by interested parties. That’s disquieting when we’re talking about being tracked online but far more so when the data is DNA. New services that offer to use our molecules to climb family trees or predict disease are offering useful–perhaps life-saving services–but the fine print acknowledges there’s no guarantee the samples won’t end up in third-party hands. In fact, it’s likely they will. Law-enforcement and corporations could gain from such knowledge, in various ways, and the ramifications could extend further into the future that we might expect.

In a Fusion article, Kashmir Hill writes that “you and all of your current and future family members could become genetic criminal suspects.” The opening:

When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient. “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”•