Your name is transferred to other relatives (your spouse, children, parents), and it does end up in press, documents, reports, yellow-page type sites, and other locations you haven't touched. Depending on your level of celebrity, it can also get plastered in news and projects you do not come in contact with. In this case though, they narrowed down a suspect, but did not bother him until they had two pieces of abandoned DNA that directly matched the killer. This is not the first time a black sheep has been found, by the DNA of relatives wealthy enough to afford a $100 test (now probably cheaper). The moment they mentioned he has a daughter and granddaughter when they announced the capture yesterday, I knew they probably triangulated him by a relative's DNA. The article today proved it.
That's not what I'm talking about. Your DNA can end up under the fingernails of a murder victim with no connection to you. Your name cannot. There was a Wired article about this the other day:
That's more of an issue with DNA evidence interpretation than a fundamental difference between different types of identifiable information. Your information can definitely end up in a crime scene that you have nothing to do with. If we use the name example, it's happened before as well [1].
