Image Jay Cook Credit Snohomish County Sheriff's Office 
 
 The involvement of Ms. Moore, the genealogist, resulted from a collaboration between Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Virginia, and the sheriff’s offices of Snohomish and Skagit counties in Washington. That followed Parabon’s announcement earlier this month that it would begin to offer a forensic genealogy service to help detectives use GEDmatch and other public databases to solve criminal cases. The company said that it is actively involved in 12 cases using this new approach. 
 
 After revelations that it had been used in the Golden State killer investigation, some GEDmatch users removed their profiles from the site or changed their settings, protesting what they felt was an invasion of privacy. Others defended the approach, arguing that if they had violent criminals in their families, they would be happy to help detectives arrest them. 
 
 Until they used the technique that incorporated the ancestry site, detectives did not have a suspect in the Washington case. Mr. Talbott, whose arrest record appears limited to a single misdemeanor, was not in any criminal DNA databases. 
 
 Investigators had previously worked with Parabon to produce an image of the suspect’s face from crime scene DNA, something that did not produce any meaningful leads. 
 
 The case has long perplexed detectives. On Nov. 18, 1987, the couple left Saanich, British Columbia, in Mr. Cook’s family van. They purchased a 10:16 p.m. ferry ticket to Seattle. No one ever heard from them again. 

 Genetic testing services have become enormously popular with people looking for long-lost relatives or clues to hereditary diseases. Most never imagined that one day intimate pieces of their DNA could be mined to assist police detectives in criminal cases. 
 
 Even as scientific experts applauded this week’s arrest of the Golden State Killer suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, some expressed unease on Friday at reports that detectives in California had used a public genealogy database to identify him. Privacy and ethical issues glossed over in the public’s rush to embrace DNA databases are now glaringly apparent, they said. 
 
 “This is really tough,” said Malia Fullerton, an ethicist at the University of Washington who studies DNA forensics. “He was a horrible man and it is good that he was identified, but does the end justify the means?” 
 
 Coming so quickly on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data on more than 70 million users was shared without their permission, it is beginning to dawn on consumers that even their most intimate digital data — their genetic profiles — may be passed around in ways they never intended.
– Detectives are using a new forensic tool to chase down murderers: DNA data mining, reports the New York Times. This week, Snohomish County police announced the arrest of William Earl Talbott, 55, in the 1987 murders of Canadians Jay Cook, 20, and Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18. The Washington investigators used a process similar to the one used to crack the notorious Golden State killer case, uploading DNA taken from the crime scene to GEDmatch, a public genealogy site. The suspect’s DNA profile led them to family members of the suspect who had shared their DNA information on the site. Based on the suspect’s DNA profile, a genetic genealogist was able to create an extensive family tree using information from the site, as well as other publicly available and social media sites. Once the detectives had their suspect, they still needed to get an exact match to his DNA, so they followed him and eventually collected a cup he had used. GEDmatch users have mixed feelings about investigators mining the site for clues. Some view it as a violation of privacy. "This is really tough," an ethicist told the Times about the Golden State Killer case. "He was a horrible man and it is good that he was identified, but does the end justify the means?" But others applaud the results. For Lee Cook, the mother of Jay Cook, the value is clear, while the loss never diminishes. "Jay … would be 51 now," she says. "He probably would have married and had kids. I would have more grandchildren. I miss all that could have been." (Police are also hoping that a genetic match will lead them to the Zodiac Killer.)