How on earth is this legal in the USA?
It seems the best the U.S. political system can come up with right now is "GDPR for X" where X represents only a few specific industries, because of strong entrenched special interests, lobbying and legalized bribery, which means strong gridlock and disagreement for a more "universal" law. Because the more industries the law would affect, the more billion-dollar corporations would fight against it with TV ads, lobbying and vote buying (sorry, I mean "campaign donations").
GDPR generally applies to all personal data of a citizen. The best I've seen from the U.S. government so far is the Consent Act, which applies only to online services only. It doesn't apply to ISPs, network providers, medical data, or a ton of other things it should apply to.
The more people realize that this "single issue" of taking money out of politics and drastically reducing or eliminating a corporations' influence on political decisions affects every other issue they care about, the better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Da...
I dimly remember some private schools using school laptops to take naked photos of their underage students.
It was pretty bad. Especially because an intern raised concerns beforehand, and those concerns were dismissed as alarmist.
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.
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/786353...
>Research found South Yorkshire was most likely to remove a DNA profile while Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Nottingham refused to remove any profiles.
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.
Looks like there is not an easy way out.