Capturing Human Environmental DNA: Ethical Challenges

In May 2023, it was reported that human genomic information can be captured relatively easy and inadvertently from environmental samples, such as air or water. Humans, as well as all other organisms, shed fragments of DNA continuously. There is a large variety of potential applications of such environmental DNA, for instance in biology, but also for criminal justice purposes. However, capturing human DNA from such environmental sources raises ethical issues. This article explores some key ethical issues of human environmental DNA, in particular those revolving around consent, privacy, commodification, and the possibility of genetic surveillance. The article suggests that insights from the digital data protection debate, in particular non-individual-based approaches to data control and governance, can be a valuable starting point for evaluating the ethical, legal, and policy aspects of human environmental DNA. As we leave genetic traces everywhere (just as we also leave digital traces everywhere online), seeking individual control over all of that information seems not only practically hardly possible, but also ethically problematic. Therefore, we need new approaches on how best to articulate and address the challenges that novel genetic information processing techniques bring about. Approaches and concepts from the online digital data debate, such as group privacy and predictive privacy, can offer a valuable way forward to think about how to effectively deal with the complex issues that human environmental DNA raises.