This paper has now been published in the peer-reviewed open access journal eLIFE. You can read it here. In the same journal there is also a good commentary article by Shai Carmi "Genealogy: the challenges of maintaining genetic privacy" which you can read here.
A new preprint has just been published by Michael "Doc" Edge and Graham Coop from the University of California Davis about some potential security risks in genetic genealogy databases. The paper is concerned with genealogy databases which accept uploads (ie, GEDmatch, FamilyTreeDNA, Living DNA and MyHeritage DNA). AncestryDNA and 23andMe do not accept uploads so they are not affected. Not all of the techniques described in the paper would necessarily work at all the companies. The companies were all given early sight of the paper so they have had the opportunity to make any adjustments. I understand that GEDmatch have already taken some unspecified measures and are considering more. The authors have provided a few suggestions on possible solutions for dealing with the risks they have highlighted and improving security such as using cryptographic signatures on DNA data files.
The authors have written some FAQs about their paper and if you want to understand what it is all about I recommend reading these FAQs first.
If you want to read the full paper it can be found here.
UC Davis have issued a press release which can be found here.
Leah Larkin has written an excellent blog post about the paper explaining the concepts in easy-to-understand terms.
Blaine Bettinger has shared his thoughts in this blog post.
I will update this post with further links if I find any other useful commentaries on the subject.
Update 18th December 2019
An updated copy of the preprint was uploaded to BiorXiv on 18th December and can be seen here.
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