As word spread last year that 23andMe was about to go bankrupt, many of their millions of customers wondered if they should delete their data. Social and conventional media were quick to offer advice ….
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Despite the near-hysterical warnings from the WashPost and other sources, 23andMe doesn’t have “your DNA.” Your genome (which contains all your DNA) has 23 pairs of chromosomes … and all together they add up to about 3.1 billion letters (nucleotides) of DNA. It might be cool if 23andMe had all that, but they don’t!
Instead, when you spit into a tube and send it to 23andMe, they run what’s called a DNA “chip” on your sample. This chip identifies less than a million individual nucleotides scattered around the genome (about 640,000, actually) … So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it.
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Related on the SLP
The privacy concern about DNA is that (according to some) it’s information that you can’t change. True enough–but plenty of other private information is just as permanent, or nearly so, and you’ve already shared that far more than you might realize.
