There’s Never Been a Better Time to Delete Your 23andMe Data. Here’s How to Do It

23andMe, the well-known genomics company, has been successful a downward spiral ever since it suffered a fairly catastrophic information breach past year. Ever since then, the company, which is headed by Sergei Brin’s ex-wife, Anne Wojcicki, has been enduring a maelstrom of controversy. Litigation, layoffs, and fiscal devastation person marred the business’s operations. As such, a batch of the company’s customers are looking to chopped and run. Understandably, radical privation to delete their accounts and purge immoderate information the institution has connected them. Unfortunately, 23andMe isn’t truly going to delete each of your data.

Oh, sure, you tin delete your account. There is simply a tutorial connected the company’s website explaining however to bash it. However, MIT Technology Review reports that, portion the institution volition technically erase your account, it plans to bent onto a chunk of the accusation associated with it. For instance, if you’ve antecedently consented to sharing your anonymized familial information with 3rd parties, there’s nary mode for you to delete that information. At the aforesaid time, the institution volition besides clasp a vague magnitude of your familial information, arsenic good arsenic accusation astir your sex, birthday, email address, and details astir your relationship deletion request, MIT writes. According to 23andMe’s privacy policy, it retains your familial and day accusation to fulfill regulatory requirements.

In short, the institution volition support grounds that your relationship existed, on with easy identifiable accusation (your DOB), your email contact, and, again, immoderate magnitude of your familial information.

If you would similar to delete your account, you tin bash it done your Account Settings tab. Some individuality verification whitethorn beryllium indispensable for you to implicit this signifier of the deletion request. You’ll get an email from the institution asking for a confirmation that you privation to delete your account. If you spell done with the deletion process, the institution notes that, erstwhile you’ve confirmed your decision, you won’t beryllium capable to spell backmost connected it.

When reached for remark by Gizmodo, a 23andMe spokesperson provided a connection that reads, successful part:

We person beardown lawsuit privateness protections successful place. 23andMe does not stock lawsuit information with 3rd parties without customers’ consent, and our Research programme is opt-in, requiring customers to spell done a separate, informed consent process earlier joining. Further, 23andMe Research is overseen by an extracurricular Institutional Review Board, ensuring we conscionable the precocious ethical standards for the probe we conduct. Roughly 80% of 23andMe customers consent to enactment successful our probe program, which has generated much than 270 adjacent reviewed publications uncovering hundreds of caller familial insights into disease.

As to the contented of information maintained aft accounts are deleted, the spokesperson said:

While we volition delete the bulk of a customer’s Personal Information pursuing an relationship deletion request, our genotyping labs are required to clasp immoderate accusation to comply with our ineligible obligations. That accusation includes a customer’s age, enactment and a subset of uninterpreted earthy familial data…

23andMe’s information breach was archetypal reported successful October of 2023 erstwhile lawsuit information showed up connected the acheronian web. At the time, 23andMe told the nationalist that only astir 14,000 accounts had been impacted by the breach. However, aboriginal probe revealed that, owed to an interior data-sharing diagnostic linked to those accounts, the existent fig of impacted radical was astir apt thing similar 6.9 million. In September of this year, 23andMe agreed to wage retired a $30 cardinal settlement related to the breach. Last month, aft it was announced that Wojcicki would effort to instrumentality the institution private, each of 23andMe’s autarkic directors resigned from the company’s board.