Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner is urging government officials to implement guardrails for new technology that allows police to use genetic genealogy to solve crimes, as there are no policies in place to prevent authorities from misusing the tools.
Patricia Kosseim issued a statement last month in response to changes to policing legislation proposed by the provincial government, highlighting the potential problem of genetic investigations launched without sufficient ground rules to preserve privacy.
“Criminal investigations by police raise significant privacy and human rights concerns, particularly in light of rapidly-evolving technologies that are making possible today things that were never before even imagined,” she wrote.
Parts of the bill introduced this spring, the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act, would give pathologists greater powers to collect and analyze tissue samples – a move the Progressive Conservative government says serves “current and future advances in health and forensic sciences, such as genetic testing.”
But Ms. Kosseim is calling on the provincial government to hold public consultations on its policing bill, warning it could spur “unknown future activity around genetic analysis, creating significant privacy risks.” Ontario officials and police officers should proceed cautiously, she says, until “appropriate statutory guardrails have been put in place.”
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Detectives across Canada are using investigative genetic genealogy, or IGG, to conduct crucial comparisons – ones where bodily fluids recovered from decades-old crime-scenes are juxtaposed against cutting-edge corporate databases containing profiles of genetic samples submitted by people tracing their family tree.
Such techniques can crack cold cases because the new data can reveal the relatives of unidentified suspects. This yields valuable leads that police can use to track killers and violent rapists even if the crimes are decades old.
Several Canadians have now been convicted of historic homicides and sexual assaults after police employed such methods.
In a separate statement also released in May, Ms. Kosseim warns that Ontario’s proposed changes to policing legislation could eviscerate her officer’s powers to keep an eye on exchanges of information by police.
“No rationale has been provided as to why government is removing the oversight functions of our office,” she said in a statement.
The office of Solicitor-General Michael Kerzner said in an e-mail that the government will take Ms. Kosseim’s concerns into consideration.
“We share the IPC’s position that privacy is important,” spokesperson Hunter Kell said.
In an e-mailed response to The Globe and Mail, Mr. Kell said the bill’s provisions giving coroners’ greater leeway to analyze tissues could potentially facilitate some police investigations.
But he said that’s not the aim of the legislation.
“The intent of such regulations is to provide greater opportunity to improve public health and safety and prevent deaths now and in the future as medical advances continue to improve knowledge about genetic connections to medical conditions.”
In an e-mail to The Globe, Ms. Kosseim’s office says it is only pointing out potential problems in legislation, and not opposing police probes that rely on new technologies.
“The IPC is not calling for a moratorium on police use of investigative genetic genealogy at this time. That said, as the science around genetic genealogy evolves, and its use by Ontario police services becomes more pervasive, this raises the risk of significant privacy concerns and the potential for prejudicial impacts to individuals, families and communities.”
In the United States, some lawmakers have placed constraints on police use of new DNA technologies. Maryland and Montana have passed laws, for example, demanding judicial oversight of probes.
Privacy watchdogs have long held that the dynamics of the DNA data-gathering by or for police can be problematic, given how anyone’s surrender of genetic material may have dramatic implications for generations to come.
Such processes can start when an individual chooses to buy a portrait of his or her genetic family tree through an online service. Popular direct-to-consumer companies urge customers to mail them saliva samples in return for a familial DNA portrait they will receive. Such documents provide insights into telltale traits, ancestors and distant relatives.
Some companies, such as Ancestry.com, do not routinely allow police access to customer data. However, other companies have different policies and they do ask consumers to hand over their DNA profile documents so that they can be put into databases, where the information is pooled and open to law-enforcement searches.
Colin Freeze