During the past couple of years, genetic genealogy has been used as an instrument for law enforcement to identify and catch criminals of unsolved cases. The method has created an ethical discussion concerning individual integrity and the potential risks an implementation of a method like this could cause. The purpose of this essay is to examine this method from an ethical perspective and discuss aspects like personal integrity, legislation and in what way people who send in their DNA to genealogy companies can affect their genetic data. Five different DNA testing genealogy companies have been selected to study and discuss in this essay. By examining their terms of conditions and privacy policies, the study will investigate how these companies act regarding the potential use from law enforcement of their DNA-databases to solve crimes. Parts of the current ethical debate regarding the method will also be presented and discussed to show potential advantages and disadvantages using a method like this could lead to. The results from the study show that forensic genetic genealogy could have both its advantages and disadvantages. Using the method has shown to be successful in capturing perpetrators behind unsolved crimes but it has also led to innocent people getting involved into criminal investigations. There are multiple ethical aspects concerning the method and the results show that there is a lack of research about the method and these aspects. There is also a lack of legislation or other forms of regulations regarding the method. The conclusion that therefore has been made is that there needs to be more research made about the ethical aspects of the method and that there needs to be more regulations to avoid the disadvantages using the method potentially could bring.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-45673 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Leppäkoski, Julia |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Arkivvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds