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Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

Is this too different from looking up a person's name in Google or Facebook search boxes? In all three scenarios Police are taking advantage of publicly available information written/published by you or about you by others. Police can inspect openly viewable property without a warrant as well. They did not find the killer's DNA in a web site, but blood relatives provided enough triangulation to hone in on a person and get their "abandoned DNA" (maybe cup, cigarette, bloody nose napkin in the trash).

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The difference is your name isn't plastered on every object you come in contact with. Your name isn't transferred to other people who come in contact with the same objects as you. Your name doesn't end up in other locations that have nothing to do with you.

The idea I could get arrested because my cousin coughed on a doorknob is terrifying. Everyone has that black sheep in their family. Why should I get harassed by the police every time they or someone they know commits a crime?

Your name is transferred to other relatives (your spouse, children, parents), and it does end up in press, documents, reports, yellow-page type sites, and other locations you haven't touched. Depending on your level of celebrity, it can also get plastered in news and projects you do not come in contact with. In this case though, they narrowed down a suspect, but did not bother him until they had two pieces of abandoned DNA that directly matched the killer. This is not the first time a black sheep has been found, by the DNA of relatives wealthy enough to afford a $100 test (now probably cheaper). The moment they mentioned he has a daughter and granddaughter when they announced the capture yesterday, I knew they probably triangulated him by a relative's DNA. The article today proved it.

That's not what I'm talking about. Your DNA can end up under the fingernails of a murder victim with no connection to you. Your name cannot. There was a Wired article about this the other day:

https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/

That's more of an issue with DNA evidence interpretation than a fundamental difference between different types of identifiable information. Your information can definitely end up in a crime scene that you have nothing to do with. If we use the name example, it's happened before as well [1].

[1] https://www.palmcoastobserver.com/article/man-wrongly-arrest...

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