So 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, and I spent about twenty minutes of my Tuesday night actually digging through their site to delete my genetic data instead of just bookmarking the article and telling myself I'd do it later, which is what I usually do with this kind of thing.
I did my kit back in 2017. I remember it cost something like $99 for the basic ancestry version, and I did it mostly because a friend at a dinner party wouldn't shut up about finding out she was part Finnish. I spat in a tube, mailed it off, and a few weeks later got a pie chart telling me I'm mostly what I already assumed I was, plus a surprising sliver of something I still can't fully explain. Fun! Harmless! A little bit of a novelty gift to myself.
What's not fun is that company now has, by their own numbers, genetic data on something like 15 million people, and it's currently sitting inside a bankruptcy proceeding as an asset. Not a metaphorical asset. An actual line item that a bankruptcy court and potential buyers get to think about. Anne Wojcicki stepped down as CEO the same day the filing happened, though she's staying on the board and has said she wants to bid to take the company private, which is its own strange loop of a story I'm not going to get into here.
The part that actually got me moving was seeing that a handful of state attorneys general, California's among them, put out consumer notices telling people to log in and delete their data now, before ownership changes hands and the privacy commitments the company originally made become somebody else's legal opinion to reinterpret. That's a pretty blunt thing for a state AG's office to say out loud. Usually those notices are hedgy. This one wasn't.
And look, 23andMe already had a real breach. Back in 2023 attackers got into something like 6.9 million accounts through credential stuffing, meaning they didn't even need to break anything clever, they just reused passwords people had already leaked elsewhere. That breach exposed ancestry info and, for a chunk of users, health-related data too. So this isn't a company with a clean track record I'm choosing to trust a little less. It's a company with an actual incident in its recent past, now going through a bankruptcy where the data itself is on the table.
Deleting your data is doable but it is not one click, and I want to complain about that specifically. You have to go into Settings, then find the account section (not the privacy section, the account section, which I tried first), scroll to the bottom, and there's a "23andMe Data" panel where you download your info if you want it, and only after that does the actual delete option show up. It also makes you go through an email confirmation step. None of this is unreasonable exactly, but it is clearly not designed for someone to do quickly, and after everything above I don't think that's an accident so much as it's just how these settings pages always get built: friction pointed one direction only.
One thing worth knowing if you're thinking about doing this yourself: deleting your account removes your genetic data and test results, but if you ever opted into their research program, there's a separate checkbox for that, and if you'd ever consented to letting a lab retain your saliva sample for regulatory reasons, that's yet another thing you may need to explicitly withdraw. It's not a single button. It's three-ish decisions dressed up as one.
I'm not trying to say every ancestry kit sale from 2015 onward was a mistake or that everyone needs to panic tonight. I got a fun pie chart and an evening's worth of dinner party conversation out of mine, and that's a fair trade in isolation. But "fun pie chart" and "permanent database of my genetic markers now changing hands in bankruptcy court" are two very different things, and the gap between how casually this data gets collected and how seriously it should be protected once collected is the actual story here, more than the stock price or who ends up buying the company.
If you did one of these kits years ago and forgot about it the way I basically had, it might be worth five minutes tonight to go check.