One night in November 1999, a 26-year-old woman was raped in a parking lot in Grand Rapids, Mich. Police officers managed to get the perpetrator’s DNA from a semen sample, but it matched no one in their databases.

Detectives found no fingerprints at the scene and located no witnesses. The woman, who had been attacked from behind, could not offer a description. It looked like the rapist would never be found.

Five years later, there was a break in the case. A man serving time for another sexual offense submitted a DNA sample with his parole application. The sample matched DNA from the rape scene.

There was just one catch: The parolee had an identical twin, and standard DNA tests can’t distinguish between identical twins. Prosecutors had no additional evidence to rule out one or the other. Because they couldn’t press charges against either of the men, the case remains open nearly 20 years later.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. said it will no longer be selling or servicing genetic sequencers in China’s Xinjiang region, following mounting criticism that its products were used for state surveillance of citizens there that enabled human rights abuses.

If no one reads the terms and conditions, how can they continue to be the legal backbone of the internet?

The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon’s terms and conditions alone out loud takes approximately nine hours.

Police stations from Massachusetts to Mumbai have received similar alerts from Facebook over the last 18 months as part of what is most likely the world’s largest suicide threat screening and alert program. The social network ramped up the effort after several people live-streamed their suicides on Facebook Live in early 2017. It now utilizes both algorithms and user reports to flag possible suicide threats.

These commercials are cute and make DNA testing look fun. And they’re clearly working. Clever marketing combined with holiday deals means parents are buying their kids DNA tests from companies 23andMe, AncestryDNA and MyHeritage. But these tests might not be appropriate for all kids, and experts say there are many reasons parents should think carefully before sending their child’s spit through the mail.

Katie Stoll, a genetic counselor and executive director of the nonprofit Genetic Support Foundation in Olympia, Wash., says her concerns around using these tests on minors boil down to the autonomy of the child. “Children should have the opportunity to grow up and decide for themselves whether or not this is information they want to know,” she says of DNA test results.

Theft of your personal medical information is on the rise, despite stringent privacy laws intended to safeguard it, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The breaches of electronic health records can include a vast array of personal information, including your Social Security number and medical history. The theft is the latest example of how all private data is increasingly subject to breaches, where credit card numbers, account log-ins and more end up in the wrong hands.

Ten years ago, Jennifer Wyms was a 17-year-old junior at Normandy High School in Wellston, Mo. She was the captain of her school’s hip-hop dance team and enjoyed going to the mall with friends. But when a health scare engulfed her St. Louis community, it cast a shadow on her high school experience.

A letter from school officials sent to parents and guardians in October 2008 relayed the news that epidemiologists with the St. Louis County Department of Health had grounds to believe that HIV may have been transmitted among some students — as many as 50 students at Normandy High School could have been exposed, it said.

“Everybody wanted to know, who had it? Where it came from? Why our school?” Wyms told The Washington Post.

Do you think you own your own medical data? Your hospital and doctor records, lab and radiology tests, genetic information, even the actual tissue removed during a biopsy or other surgical procedure? Well, you don’t.

It’s a good bet that the fine print of the consent form you signed before your latest test or operation said that all the data or tissue samples belong to the doctor or institution performing it. They can study it, sell it or do whatever they want with it, without notifying or compensating you, although the data must be depersonalized in their best effort to make sure you are anonymous.

The picture of genetic privacy that emerges from this systematic literature review is complex and riddled with gaps. When asked specifically “are you worried about genetic privacy,” the general public, patients, and professionals frequently said yes. In many cases, however, that question was posed poorly or only in the most general terms. While many participants expressed concern that genomic and medical information would be revealed to others, respondents frequently seemed to conflate privacy, confidentiality, control, and security. People varied widely in how much control they wanted over the use of data.