In 2017, detectives with the East Bay Regional Park Police Department were poring over a long-standing unsolved case. They had an idea that might help them solve the murder of Maria Jane Waidhofer, whose body was found in Tilden Regional Park in 1990.
Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic material from Bulk SMS Argentina the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs, a company that claims it can recreate a person's face from their DNA.
The data was fed into a machine learning model, and soon the detectives had the face of a potential suspect.
The company assumed that the killer was a man. He had fair skin without freckles, brown eyes, brown hair, and thick eyebrows.
It wasn’t a photograph, but a 3D render, a bridge across the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction. The algorithm suggested what a person with the genetic characteristics found in the DNA sample might look like. The artist who draws the photoworks added a vague short haircut and mustache in Photoshop—details that aren’t found in DNA, but that eyewitnesses mentioned.
In 2017, the department made a controversial decision to release the resulting photo. In 2020, one of the detectives did something that seems even more problematic — and also violates Parabon NanoLabs’ user agreement: he asked the Northern California Regional Analytical Center to run the image through a facial recognition program.
This was revealed in a hacked police archive published by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets. It is the first known case of police attempting to use facial recognition technology on an image generated by a DNA-based algorithm from a crime scene. However, it is unlikely to be the last.
