Ancestry.com change draws fire

Ethnicity update results aren’t always accurate.

Ancestry.com, the website better known for helping users create family trees, find distant family members and capture suspected serial killers, made a lot of customers angry last week.

Ancestry, which also is in the business of DNA testing, allows users to send a vial of saliva to the company and receive in return a detailed genetic portfolio, including risk for some diseases and estimates of their ethnic ancestry.

Neither the medical nor the heritage information are guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate, but as the science improves, so does the quality of the results. At least, that’s what Ancestry insists.

After Ancestry rolled out an update to its ethnicity estimate system last week, users noticed dramatic changes in their ethnic profiles – some of which is wrong, customers say. The science is simple: Ancestry compares sections of your DNA with a “reference panel” of DNA samples it knows correspond to a certain place (say, Italy or southern Africa) to try to identify a match. The update expands the reference panel by a factor of five, so it should be more accurate.

Still, many users remain angry with Ancestry as their original results have, in some cases, drastically changed. Other users said they were happy with the results or found that the new results better matched what they knew of their family history.

In April, it was revealed that DNA from a decadesold crime scene was plugged into a genealogy website. Investigators followed family trees to try to narrow down a suspect. That search led to Joseph James DeAngelo, suspected of being the Golden State Killer. DeAngelo, who lived in the Sacramento, California, suburb of Citrus Heights when he was arrested in April, is accused in 12 killings across California in the 1970s and ’80s.

A spokesperson for Ancestry.com, which also has a search for the public, said the company was not in contact with authorities in the DeAngelo case and will not share member information with law enforcement “unless compelled to by valid legal process.” At the time, Ancestry.com said it was unaware of the investigation.