For Christmas last year, my mother bought me an AncestryDNA kit. Since I have absolutely no knowledge of my family’s ancestry, I thought it was a neat gift, and I was excited to see the results. I followed all of the instructions: I spit in the tube, labelled it with the sticker they gave me, and sent it off to their address in the mail. Every week or so, I would check the status update on their website, and it would always say that my sample was being extracted and analyzed. However, due to order backup or some other reason, I never got the results of my DNA test back.
While this may seem beside the point, what bothered me about the entire situation was that I did not get my results OR my DNA sample back. This left me to question whether their “sample status” feature was bogus and they never received my DNA or whether they were unknowingly doing something else with my data. However, I know that, reasonably, they just didn’t receive it. Nevertheless, since then I’ve wondered what AncestryDNA legally has permission to do with customers’ DNA and how the company preserves the privacy rights customers have in regards to their sample. With this said, I’ve compiled a list of important statements in Ancestry’s privacy statement, which people should really read themselves, that are relevant to what they do with your data.
Your DNA sample is securely stored.
According to their “Privacy for Your AncestryDNA Test” statement, data samples collected by the company are stored in a secure, temperature-controlled facility with “24-hour monitoring”. While it is fantastic for Ancestry to preserve their customer’s privacy by securely storing their DNA samples prior to testing, I’m not entirely sure why they wouldn’t dispose of it after testing unless they are using your data for their own purposes. Likely, they just using it for research efforts– and before you can claim that you did not consent to this, most participants thoughtlessly check the box to provide “informed consent” while trying to access their results.
You have the choice to delete your DNA test results.
The good news is that you have the option to permanently delete your AncestryDNA test results from your account, and if you do so, your DNA matches “will no longer see your username in their list of matches”. The bad news is that this by no means suggests that Ancestry will delete your DNA test result from their own private databases. More bad news? You also cannot withdraw your results and information from any studies that are in progress, completed, or published. But just wait, there’s even more bad news! If the last two didn’t make you skeptical enough of Ancestry, just wait until you hear what they had to say about deleting your DNA sample (Hint: They said nothing). There is nowhere on the Ancestry website that says that a user can delete their DNA sample permanently from their profile or Ancestry’s database, only that you can delete DNA test results.
If your Data is somehow made public or made available through a security breach, it may be used to identify you, and may negatively impact your ability to obtain certain types of insurance coverage.
Although Ancestry claims they do their best to secure your data, no security measures are entirely infallible. Security breaches happen. It just so happens that if a security breach happens with Ancestry, your ability to obtain insurance could be negatively impacted. Luckily, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) protects people from genetic discrimination in health insurance. However, it is not applicable to life insurance, which is considered a big deal to some.
Finally, there’s my favorite fine print statement:
It may be used by law enforcement agencies to identify you if they have additional DNA data to compare to your Data or if you have Data linked to a family member’s name.
This one, to me, is the scariest. It means that law enforcement agents can use your Ancestry DNA sample to link you to a crime, and even worse, it can use a family member’s data to link you to a crime. This is pretty significant as it makes it possible for you to be falsely incarcerated for a crime your family member might have committed due to “undeniable DNA evidence”.
All of these conditions are in their privacy statement. However, they must be searched for, are not transparent, and ultimately cause confusion in customers in regards to their data. Yet, somehow, “your trust is our top priority” according to Ancestry. Maybe it was a good thing that they never received my sample after all.
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