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 \u2026.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
Despite the near-hysterical warnings from the\u00a0WashPost\u00a0and other sources, 23andMe doesn\u2019t have \u201cyour DNA.\u201d Your genome (which contains all your DNA) has 23 pairs\u00a0of chromosomes \u2026 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\u2019t!<\/p>\n
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Instead, when you spit into a tube and send it to 23andMe, they run what\u2019s called a DNA \u201cchip\u201d on your sample. This chip identifies less than a million individual nucleotides scattered around the genome (about 640,000, actually) \u2026 So no, they don\u2019t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
The privacy concern about DNA is that (according to some) it\u2019s information that you can\u2019t change. True enough\u2013but plenty of other private information is just as permanent, or nearly so, and you\u2019ve already shared that far more than you might realize.<\/p>\n