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The genetic genealogy industry is booming. In recent years, more than 15 million people have offered up their DNA — a cheek swab, some saliva in a test-tube — to services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com in pursuit of answers about their heritage. In exchange for a genetic fingerprint, individuals may find a birth parent, long-lost cousins, perhaps even a link to Oprah or Alexander the Great. But as these registries of genetic identity grow, it’s becoming harder for individuals to retain any anonymity. (Murphy, 10/11)

About 60 percent of the U.S. population with European heritage may be identifiable from their DNA by searching consumer websites, even if they've never made their own genetic information available, a study estimates. And that number will grow as more and more people upload their DNA profiles to websites that use genetic analysis to find relatives, said the authors of the study released Thursday by the journal Science. (Ritter, 10/11)

“Genetic privacy is becoming compromised over time,” said Eric Topol, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who is familiar with the researchers’ findings but wasn’t involved in the studies published Thursday. Genetic data can reveal private information that people don’t always want to share. DNA can be used to identify someone’s risk of a future medical condition, opening individuals and their children to possible discrimination or receiving information they don’t want to know. (Marcus, 10/11)

This new reality represents the convergence of two long-standing trends.One of them is the rise of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Companies such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe can sequence anyone’s DNA for about $100. All you have to do is provide a sample of saliva and drop it in the mail. The other essential element is the proliferation of publicly searchable genealogy databases like GEDmatch. Anyone can upload a full genome to these sites and powerful computers will crunch through it, looking for stretches of matching DNA sequences that can be used to build out a family tree. (Netburn, 10/12)

"It's kind of like each person in this database is a beacon that illuminates hundreds of distant relatives," Erlich says. "So it's enough to have your third cousin or your second cousin once-removed in these databases to actually identify you." And when the researchers combined their strategy with other information, such a specific geographic area or the approximate age of a person, they could quickly reduce a list of possibilities to just a few people. (Stein, 10/11)

The idea that people who voluntarily spit into a tube and share their genetic data online to search for relatives could unwittingly aid law enforcement was thrust into the spotlight recently. This spring, genetic genealogy helped California police identify a suspected serial killer and rapist in a grisly, decades-old cold case. But the new study, published in the journal Science, drives home the reality that that instance was not an outlier; a majority of Americans of European descent could be matched to a third cousin or closer using an open-access genetic genealogy database. (Johnson, 10/11)

To crack that case, the California investigators used GEDmatch, an online database that allows people who got their DNA analyzed by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry to upload their raw genetic data so that they can track down distant relatives. MyHeritage’s database — which contains data from 1.75 million people, mostly Americans who’ve gotten their DNA analyzed by MyHeritage’s genetic testing business — works similarly, although it explicitly prohibits forensic searches. (23andMe warns users about the privacy risks of uploading their genetic data to such third party sites.) (Robbins, 10/11)

Skyway pedestrians in Minneapolis can earn $100 for samples of their blood, urine and saliva in the latest type of mass genetic testing, this time to help develop life insurance products. Scientific Testing Partners, which set up in the second floor of the U.S. Bank building at the start of October, is seeking 1,000 participants in a project that illustrates the rapid expanse in genetic know-how and in its collection of data for business, public health, genealogy and academic research. (Olson, 10/11)