3 ms·

The UK collects DNA on anyone who has been convicted of a crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

The UK collects DNA on anyone who has been convicted of a crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Da...

cft 9y ago
At least one could argue that a person has a choice: to commit or not to commit a crime. But a newborn does not have a choice to have its DNA collected. This is the worst violation of privacy I have ever read about in my life. And I find not that surprising that CA is one of the few states where this is practiced.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  > This is the worst violation of privacy I have ever read about in my life. I dimly remember some private schools using school laptops to take naked photos of their underage students.
  - cft 9y ago
    But that was probably criminal and not mandated at the state level! It makes me very very scared of the benevolence and of the thought process of CA government.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School... It was pretty bad. Especially because an intern raised concerns beforehand, and those concerns were dismissed as alarmist.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Actually pretty much everybody has committed a crime, sometimes unwittingly but still.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  Only they take it when you were arrested, not when you are convicted. Anyone can get arrested - it doesn't take you committing a crime for this to happen. Innocent people get arrested. Sometimes, folks are accidentally guilty. Bag of drugs in your back seat, dropped by that workmate you drove to lunch? It is your problem now. Not to mention the way the system is run in the US, innocent people wind up convicted. Some folks convict themselves voluntarily because getting arrested and waiting in jail for a trial can do some major life damage.
Spare_account 9y ago
They collect DNA of anyone arrested by the police. Then they aim to destroy samples taken from people not subsequently convicted. As I understand it the process is quite opaque and there have been cases where some police forces have revealed that they are unable to (or simply refuse to) comply with the requirement to delete samples so they keep everything. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7863539/Police-ordered-to-use-powers-to-delete-innocents-DNA-records.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/786353... >Research found South Yorkshire was most likely to remove a DNA profile while Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Nottingham refused to remove any profiles.
- vixen99 9y ago
  So they make their own laws or break existing law? Either is unacceptable. How is one 'unable' to destroy a tissue sample?
  - Spare_account 9y ago
    I'm lucky to be able to say that I haven't experienced it directly to be able to answer in more detail but the article I linked suggests that it is a bit of both. Some senior police officers interpret the rules in a way that suits them, some people say the law as written is ambiguous. I mostly interpret "Unable" in this context to mean it would require too many man-hours to clean up the database because it has been allowed to grow too large and disorganised. I can't back that up with evidence, it's just something I recall hearing. There are no doubt other reasons and this applies to the overall picture rather than individual requests for removal. In the case of an individual request I could still imagine that the system is so badly designed that it isn't actually possible to locate all parts of a sample, all references to an individual in the (various) database(s). I've seen environments like that in the corporate world, I assume the government is capable of creating them as well.

The UK collects DNA on anyone who has been convicted of a crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Da...

cft 9y ago

At least one could argue that a person has a choice: to commit or not to commit a crime. But a newborn does not have a choice to have its DNA collected. This is the worst violation of privacy I have ever read about in my life. And I find not that surprising that CA is one of the few states where this is practiced.

blattimwind 9y ago
> This is the worst violation of privacy I have ever read about in my life. I dimly remember some private schools using school laptops to take naked photos of their underage students.
- cft 9y ago
  But that was probably criminal and not mandated at the state level! It makes me very very scared of the benevolence and of the thought process of CA government.
- DanBC 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School... It was pretty bad. Especially because an intern raised concerns beforehand, and those concerns were dismissed as alarmist.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Actually pretty much everybody has committed a crime, sometimes unwittingly but still.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
Only they take it when you were arrested, not when you are convicted. Anyone can get arrested - it doesn't take you committing a crime for this to happen. Innocent people get arrested. Sometimes, folks are accidentally guilty. Bag of drugs in your back seat, dropped by that workmate you drove to lunch? It is your problem now. Not to mention the way the system is run in the US, innocent people wind up convicted. Some folks convict themselves voluntarily because getting arrested and waiting in jail for a trial can do some major life damage.

Spare_account 9y ago

They collect DNA of anyone arrested by the police. Then they aim to destroy samples taken from people not subsequently convicted. As I understand it the process is quite opaque and there have been cases where some police forces have revealed that they are unable to (or simply refuse to) comply with the requirement to delete samples so they keep everything. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7863539/Police-ordered-to-use-powers-to-delete-innocents-DNA-records.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/786353... >Research found South Yorkshire was most likely to remove a DNA profile while Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Nottingham refused to remove any profiles.

vixen99 9y ago
So they make their own laws or break existing law? Either is unacceptable. How is one 'unable' to destroy a tissue sample?
- Spare_account 9y ago
  I'm lucky to be able to say that I haven't experienced it directly to be able to answer in more detail but the article I linked suggests that it is a bit of both. Some senior police officers interpret the rules in a way that suits them, some people say the law as written is ambiguous. I mostly interpret "Unable" in this context to mean it would require too many man-hours to clean up the database because it has been allowed to grow too large and disorganised. I can't back that up with evidence, it's just something I recall hearing. There are no doubt other reasons and this applies to the overall picture rather than individual requests for removal. In the case of an individual request I could still imagine that the system is so badly designed that it isn't actually possible to locate all parts of a sample, all references to an individual in the (various) database(s). I've seen environments like that in the corporate world, I assume the government is capable of creating them as well.