Over at the Biopolitical Times blog, Osagie Obasogie has a good post about the privacy implications of a new fad that has "CSI parents" swabbing and storing their children's DNA in case of future kidnapping. An excerpt:
[A] recent MSNBC news story suggests that pop forensic science is going beyond teaching would-be felons to wipe down crime scenes with Clorox and creating a new generation of “CSI parents.” Using kits that are available online, at police stations, or at doctors’ offices, parents are swabbing their children’s cheeks and banking their DNA on the off chance that it will help in their rescue or identification in the event of abduction. [...]
Keeping a copy of your daughter’s DNA with her fingerprints may ultimately end up being a benign gesture. But what’s troubling is that unlike the thumb prints I took as a kindergartener in the 80s, an increasing number of these genetic samples are centrally stored in FBI labs next to samples from sex offenders, murderers, and other convicted felons. It’s entirely unclear whether these children’s samples are scanned each time the databases are used to find a crime scene match. It’s even less clear what happens to the samples when these children become adults. What is clear, however, is that given governments’ inclination towards keeping DNA samples indefinitely, parents should be as vigilant of their children’s privacy as they are of their safety.
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