The flipside of a rogue DNA test, of course, is it can also deliver the devastating news to a father that he has no blood ties to his children. In the US and the UK, thats led to a wave of paternity fraud cases, where men have sued for damages after being hoodwinked into raising or financially supporting someone elses child. In 2017, a Liverpool woman was sent to jail for 12 months after admitting she faked a paternity test.

Auckland legal researcher Zo Lawton, who has investigated issues around deceitful and misattributed paternity, says men able to prove theyre not the biological father can apply to the IRD for a refund of child support. However no figures are kept on how often that has happened. In the UK and Australia, men have brought claims under the tort of deceit for emotional distress and the cost of raising the child. Lawton would be interested to see a test case argued here to see whether we follow the UK, where claims have been allowed, or Australia, which has been far more conservative. In New Zealand, there is no legal obligation for anyone to submit to a paternity test, and a court cannot order a child to be tested, although a finding can be made based on other evidence, as happened in the case of former Auckland mayor John Banks.

Lawton is writing a book on famous or landmark cases to do with sex, IVF and contraception. One involves a New Zealand man who claimed he was tricked into fathering a child and wanted out of child support obligations (the courts decision went against him). In another case, in Canada, a man was found guilty of sexual assault after he swapped his partners birth control for a placebo.

Sometimes the truth comes out when a relationship breaks down and the mother tells her partner hes not the biological father because she wants full custody, she says. Some men feel really angry and dont want anything to do with the mother or child. Others dont care theres no biological relationship and say, I love this child and I want to stay in their life. Its so complex.

Sometimes a non-biological father knows the truth from the outset, thinking theyre doing the right thing for the benefit of the child to minimise the hurt. But people arent good at keeping secrets. Eventually someone spills the beans.

Lawton says sometimes the secret is weighing on their mind, and they feel an obligation to let their son or daughter know. Others find out when their biological father dies. He feels guilty for not being in their life, leaves a note saying, Surprise! and a slice of his estate, which comes as a shock to the rest of the family.

Sometimes the child gets an inkling as they get older, especially a teenager who feels disconnected from their father or that theyre the oddball in the family, and starts digging around. DNA is just another way for them to find out.

Key players such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe have dedicated staff to handle more sensitive queries, yet the reality is their customers are often home alone when they click on their test results. Rebekah Drumsta thinks there should be compulsory warnings on DNA test kits about the potential harm of unexpected results, in the same way there are cancer warnings on cigarette packs.

AncestryDNAs international spokesperson Brad Argent, who gave a public talk in Auckland in June, recommends anyone considering an ancestry test should talk with their parents first, to give them an opportunity to disclose any family secrets. In his experience, most people whose results show an anomaly already had suspicions something was up. We do our best to inform people of the risks.

Also problematic is that DNA matching means even people not on the database risk automatically losing their genetic anonymity an issue raised in a recent blog by the Privacy Commissioner.

Last year, the commissioner was contacted by a man whose sister took an ancestry test, and discovered a close relative no one in the family knew about. The person turned out to have been conceived using sperm the man had donated in the 1980s, after being reassured he would be anonymous and untraceable. He complained that the DNA-testing company had not sought his consent in disclosing the existence of this person to his sister. However, in this case the Privacy Act (which regulates how agencies collect, use, disclose and store personal information) did not apply, because it was not the actions of the company but of the mans sister and his biological child that resulted in the information being revealed, because they had uploaded their DNA.

Dr Andelka Phillips, a senior law lecturer at Waikato University and a research associate at Oxford University, has privacy concerns around DNA testing, including the capacity of a legal guardian to give consent on a childs behalf, particularly because you dont know necessarily how long the data is going to be stored or who its going to be shared with.

Phillips also recommends discussing testing with your family, not just in case there are secrets, but because so much of our DNA is shared. Ancestry results, she notes, should be treated with caution. The tests are not standardised, so you can get contradictory results from different companies. Even the largest databases dont have large samples from all populations, and indigenous peoples and other minorities are often under-represented.

In most cases, she says, companies arent making a profit from the sale of the test kits themselves but by accumulating large databases that can be used in commercial partnerships. AncestryDNA recently teamed up with Spotify to create curated playlists inspired by a persons ancestral origins, while 23andMe is collaborating with Airbnb to provide genetically tailored travel experiences. The latter has partnered with at least 15 pharmaceutical companies; last year GlaxoSmithKline announced it was investing $US300 million into 23andMe to use aggregate customer data for drug research.

Read the fine print before ordering a genetic test online, advises Phillips. Her book Buying your Self on the Internet: Wrap Contracts and Personal Genomics has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. It looks at the rise of the genetic-testing industry, and the legal and ethical issues involved. Shed like to see specific regulation of the industry and far more transparency in DNA-testing contracts and privacy policies, particularly over consent for data to be used for research or shared with third parties, such as drug companies and law-enforcement agencies.

First rule of data: once you hand it over, you lose control of it, University of California law professor Elizabeth Joh warned recently on Twitter. You have no idea how the terms of service will change for your recreational DNA.

Read more: How the use of DNA in criminal investigations could violate your human rights

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How genetic tests are tearing families apart and bringing others together - Noted

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