This chapter examines law enforcement authorities’ growing interest in using DTC genetic test providers’ databases for solving crime. The chapter discusses the legal avenues the Swedish police authority took in their use of GEDmatch to resolve a 16-year-old double murder, discussing the legal prerequisites for such access and use as well as embarking on a exploration of the possibility of relying on the derogation of special categories of personal data being manifestly made public by the data subject and weighing possible amendments to the existing legal landscape.

Access has become a keyword of the twenty-first century. However, even in the 1960s, government data collection and growing computational power facilitated new forms of statistical analysis that people thought could become new ‘intelligence’ systems. The legislative response to these threats were new data protection and information privacy regimes that included ‘data subject rights’ – mechanisms by which individuals could obtain access to information about them held by others, and rectify any inaccuracy. This type of transparency gave individuals a way to participate in the profiling regime, by attempting to ensure that the data used by profilers was accurate and relevant. Informed by the German constitutional concept of informational self-determination, limitations to profiling in data protection are premised on the idea that a person’s self-image ought to be the primary determinant of their identity. However, it is argued here that this approach loses traction as the profiling environment becomes more sophisticated.