Comparative Law - Genetic Privacy - Icelandic Supreme Court Holds that Inclusion of an Individual’s Genetic Information in a National Database Infringes on the Privacy Interests of His Child

Abstract

This is a brief comment on the Iceland Supreme Court case of Guðmundsdóttir v. Iceland. In that case, the daughter of a deceased man whose genetic, ancestral and health information were scheduled to be included in a national database successfully argued that including her father's information infringed her own privacy, since information about her could be inferred from "his" genetic information. I suggest that in the U.S., at least, it may make more sense to think about inherently familial genetic information through the lens of property law, with its ability to recognize and balance competing property interests in the same object, rather than privacy law, which tends to be fairly individualistic.

Keywords: Genetics, health information, privacy, property