Californians have the right to direct the company to delete their genetic data OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today issued a consumer alert to customers of 23andMe, a genetic testing and information company. The California-based company has publicly reported that it is in financial distress and stated in securities filings that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.
Well I’m glad I downloaded all my genome data and deleted it a few months ago. It was easy to do, there’s no excuse not to.
It’s cute you think that it’s actually deleted
Yes, it’s not worth them fucking around with various pii / gdpr fines. As someone who has worked with pii, we always took deletion requests seriously.
But like… deleting the data would lessen the sale price. Much easier to just delete your account and keep the data in an “anonymous” form. How are you (as the consumer) going to ever know if it’s actually deleted?
No lawyer / accountant is going to sign off on that. It would get flagged as fraud during due diligence and lower the price due to the risks of lawsuits and fines
I’m sure there’s some legal text somewhere that states that deleting only refers to the association with your user account, but the actual genome data will still be kept “anonymized.” There’s just no way in hell that they’re actually deleting it all. Their lawyers are smarter than that.
If you read the fine print, they keep your sample data for 2 years after deletion.
So maybe they actually delete your email address, but the DNA data itself is still definitely there.
I felt weird about it when my dad used this 23andMe service. He was very privacy-conscious, so it was uncharacteristic for him. Now he’s dead. I wonder if there’s still any way to get it deleted.
Email them? https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212170688-Requesting-23andMe-Account-Closure