Ginny Fahs:

Well, according to 23andMe’s privacy policy, in addition to genomic data, which is the A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s that we all learn about in science classes, they also collect a lot of personal information about their customers.

So that’s things like your home address, your family history, your payment information, those sorts of things. So they’re sitting on a pretty robust amount of data for each of their customers. And because the privacy policy gives them dispensation to use that data in lots of different ways, it’s hard to know as a customer how exactly that data is being used.

You would have to read a multipage privacy policy with a lot of legalese to understand. And in the case of this bankruptcy, it’s possible that that data will change hands and be beholden to different policies. So there’s a lot of uncertainty out there.

And that’s why we are advising 23andMe customers to delete their data as soon as possible.