As reported by various media outlets today, 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy protection in the USA. Anne Wojcicki has stepped down as CEO but is staying on the board. They’ve also published an open letter to their customers. The current intention is to sell the company.
There’s a lot of discussion on social media about deleting your kits before things change hands. I don’t know what the right answer is here. If you’re in the Facebook group “Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques”, there’s a good post from Blaine Bettinger, whose take is that there’s a lot of scaremongering at the moment. I do think it’s worth downloading your DNA files from 23andMe so that you have a back-up. I have instructions below on how to do this or delete your kit below. The site is very slow today – obviously getting hammered by users.
Companies get bought and sold all the time. Both Ancestry and MyHeritage have been sold in the time I’ve had my DNA on there. We don’t know what will happen here, just as we didn’t know then. No doubt many people will delete their kits and this will make the site less valuable for genealogical work. I’ve always found a different set of people testing there than the other DNA sites and often they don’t cross over. A few cases of unknown parentage have been cracked by a single match who only tested on 23andMe. I’d be sad to see it go but this has really been inevitable since the credential stuffing incident (often incorrectly reported as a data breach) in late 2023. If you’re already on the other sites, the genie is out of the bottle anyway.
To download or delete your data from 23andMe, log in to your account and click on the settings from the top right hand corner menu.
When you get to the settings, scroll all the way to the bottom and select view.
The next screen asks you to enter your date of birth as an additional security check.
Once confirmed, there’s a long list of choices, which is too big to screen shot.
If you want to save your data, download copies of your reports & your raw data file, which can be transferred to some of the other DNA databases for free. They will email you when the files are ready for download. This might take a while.
If you want to delete, then scroll to the very bottom of the page to access that option. They will email you to double check this is what you want to do. Note that this deletes all kits on your account. There doesn’t seem to be an option to retain or delete a subset.