Want help protecting your privacy?

Squirrel holding DNA as an analogy for protecting your genetic privacy

We can help

Need our help masking your identity so that you can receive the services of 23andMe.com or Ancestry.com anonymously? Inquire about joining our beta program by filling out the contact form below.

They learn as little about you as possible, we learn only what you want to tell us (and store nothing), and you get worry-free genetic testing!

  (Not your real name, just what you would like us to call you.)
  (We will store and use this email to communicate with you only until we make you an anonymous email address.)

FAQ

When it comes to privacy it’s healthy to be skeptical about everything you are told. But there are three good reasons why you can trust us:

1. We don’t require (or want) any of your personal information, and whatever you do happen to give us we don’t store. We maintain no database for hackers to break into or to sell to third-parties, and if we did, the information contained within it would be sparse. If you are technically savvy you could also look at our website code and see that even our google analytics user tracking code (which gives us an idea of how many people visit our website and what they do on it) is set up to keep your IP address private from us. In a nutshell, we don’t want the responsibility of protecting your personal information – please keep it to yourself!

2. We alert you to take precaution before sharing any personal information with us, and will tell you how to protect your information from us. 

3. We are a private Canadian company with no affiliation with any other entity, corporate, government, not-for-profit, or otherwise. We are transparent about who we are and what we want to accomplish.

No, you send your saliva sample directly to your selected service provider (we show you how to do this anonymously). We have no access to your saliva or DNA.

We don’t have to. When we set up your account with your provider we only have access until you have changed your account password to something that only you know (after we have given you the tools to access their website anonymously). Since it takes weeks for your DNA test results to become available, there is no need for us to have access to your reports or raw data.

Even if we did have temporary access, our policy is to not view or download any reports, raw data, or anything else. Nor would this genetic data have value anyway since it will not have any personally identifying information attached to it – which is the whole point 🙂

With all that said, if you would prefer, we could handle the entire process for you, including sending you your reports and/or raw data so that you never have any direct interaction with your chosen provider. Either way we do not view or store your genetic information. Our service is in ‘beta’ right now – we’re still trying to figure out what our customers would like and are comfortable with.

3 thoughts on “Help from DNASquirrel”

  1. Hi I had opted in to allow my DNA to be tested I said yes to a lot of things before I even knew the death of the DNA testing and how it was misappropriated so I would like help to go back and we can’t you know change all of my answers to be willing to participate and what they were asking can you help me with this

    1. Hello Billie,

      Many people have done the same as you and then regretted it, so you are not alone.

      In order to recover some of your privacy, you could log in to your online account, delete any extraneous information that you are allowed to delete, change any information that you are allowed to change, opt-out of any clinical studies (you can’t opt out of anything that they have already used your genetic profile for), and request that your DNA sample be destroyed. If you are done using the company’s services you could also close your account, which should result in the deletion of much but not all of your personal information. Unfortunately, they will likely keep your contact information indefinitely.

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