What’s Wrong with Forensic Uses of Biobanks?

Abstract

Privacy is increasingly becoming a more and more serious concern in the context of biobanking. For that reason, the anonymization and pseudonymization of samples donors’ data have lately attracted much research work. The concern with privacy is particularly evident in the area of forensic uses of biobanks data. More concretely, opponents have argued that forensic data bases (i) discriminate against certain social groups, particularly when the data are kept even after the suspect has been dismissed from the investigation or acquitted in trial; (ii) lead to miscarriages of justice, as it is shown by some cases where innocents were found guilty because of errors committed in genetic data analysis; (iii) can be misused by governments to control citizens through information storage that might be used against them in the future; (iv) violate donors’ privacy, particularly as genetic data banks imply that confidential information about donors’ – as well as their relatives’ – propensity to develop certain diseases is collected and put at researchers’ – or State authorities’ – disposal. Finally, it is also argued that all these problematic aspects of forensic biobanking, as they were expressed in the objections above, (v) can be conducive to the discredit of genetic biobanks in general, thus weakening people’s willingness to contribute their samples to the repositories. Common to all these objections is however a remarkable lack of conceptual accuracy regarding both the nature and the content of the so called right to privacy. Obviously, this has a direct bearing on how the other objections should be judged.