Correction to: Nature Reviews Genetics https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-022-00455-y published online 04 March 2022.

The originally published version of this article contained some errors in the referencing that unintentionally occurred at the proofs stage. Two mentions of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (the sentence starting “The most notable example” in the section “General Data Protection Regulation”; and the mention of GDPR in the Figure 1 legend) should have cited reference 12 rather than reference 13. Additionally, the phrase “extend legal protections to discarded DNA” (in the section “Other legal issues in the United States”) should have cited reference 22 rather than reference 12. Finally, reference 10 in the reference list (Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsh) contained typographical errors. These have all been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the manuscript. The editors apologize for these errors.