Everything here traces to something dated.
Reference block version 1.0, current as of 16 August 2026
A tool that tells investigators what the rules are should be checkable. Every substantive claim made on this site and inside the case tool is listed below with the source it came from. Where a thing could not be verified, the tool says so rather than filling the gap — the reference block carries explicit “could not verify” entries, and the most consequential of them is that no default setting for FamilyTreeDNA’s investigative matching can be established from its own published pages, so Truestone refuses to assert one.
This list will go out of date, and that is the point of dating it.Terms of service change without notice and statutes change every session. If you find something here that has moved, tell us and it gets corrected with a version bump rather than a silent edit.
The DOJ Interim Policy on Forensic Genetic Genealogical DNA Analysis and Searching took effect 1 November 2019 and is still the operative federal policy.
US Department of Justice, Office of Legal Policy — forensic science
It binds DOJ investigations, DOJ-funded investigations, DOJ employees and contractors, and state, local and tribal agencies receiving DOJ grant funds. It has no enforcement mechanism.
“A suspect shall not be arrested based solely on a genetic association generated by a GG service.”
Three states regulate FIGG specifically: Maryland (effective 1 October 2021), Montana (MCA 44-6-104, 2021, amended 2025) and Utah (SB 156, 2023, amended by SB 218 effective 1 May 2024).
Maryland Ch. 681 (2021); Montana MCA 44-6-104; Utah SB 156 / SB 218
In September 2023 GEDmatch published a notice that FIGG practitioners had circumvented opt-out settings, advocated not disclosing the misuse, trained others to use it, and doctored reports to prevent it becoming known.
Verogen / GEDmatch notice, 14 September 2023, updated 13 November 2023
An Idaho trial court held on 19 February 2025 that violation of a database’s terms “cannot alone give rise to Fourth Amendment challenge where … the search of the databases was otherwise lawful.” It is a trial-court order, not precedent; the defendant pleaded guilty in July 2025 and there is no appellate ruling.
Order on Defendant's Motion to Suppress Genetic Information, Idaho District Court, 19 February 2025
Since August 2025, Ancestry’s Terms prohibit using its Services in connection with any law enforcement investigation or criminal judicial proceeding. Current terms effective 12 May 2026.
23andMe’s transparency report, updated 30 April 2026, shows 13 US law enforcement requests covering 17 accounts, cumulative since 2015, with zero data produced.
GEDmatch has been opt-in for law-enforcement matching since May 2019 and has been owned by QIAGEN since it completed its acquisition of Verogen on 9 January 2023.
There is no published ANSI or Academy Standards Board standard for FIGG, and OSAC has no subcommittee for it. ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation covers the laboratory half only; the genealogical research component has no accreditation standard.
AAFS Academy Standards Board consensus bodies; ISHI News, 17 October 2024
Failure to disclose FIGG use to the defence is a named process failure, and confirmatory testing does not cure the bias an initial match introduces.
Policing Project at NYU Law, FIGG: a civil rights and civil liberties review, June 2026
Roughly 1,600 cases have been resolved by forensic investigative genetic genealogy in the US and Canada as of February 2026; around 120 of them were crowdfunded. Cases run about $5,000–$7,500 all in.
NBC News, 21 February 2026, reporting the Forensic Genetic Genealogy Project dataset
ForenSeq Kintelligence targets 10,230 SNPs, recommends about 1 ng of input and has produced results down to 50 pg. Consumer arrays type roughly 650,000 SNPs. CODIS uses 20 core STR loci, effective 1 January 2017.
QIAGEN ForenSeq Kintelligence documentation; FBI CODIS/NDIS fact sheet
No published guidance specific to FIGG family notification could be found. The nearest applicable documents — SAKI (July 2019), AEquitas (August 2018) and NIJ (July 2019) — all assume a prosecution is ahead.
Things Truestone will not tell you
- How long a FIGG case takes. No defensible average is published anywhere, so the tool gives no figure.
- How many states permit familial searching. NIJ’s published-policy review names five, but that review is dated 2016 and secondary sources now name around ten. There is no current authoritative count, so the tool refuses the number.
- The size of GEDmatch’s law-enforcement pool. The “2M+” marketing figure is not disaggregated, and the last verifiable opt-in number is roughly 260,000 from 2019.
- Whether your conduct was lawful. That is your counsel’s call, and the tool says so on every screen.