Your data is for sale

Your DNA results are in — and they’re 100 percent the property of a pharmaceutical manufacturer.
American biotech company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals announced today that it’s buying 23andMe, the bankrupt consumer-genomics company that sold take-home DNA kits. Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire “substantially all” of 23andMe’s assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.

Put simply, the genetic information of millions is now in the hands of a drugmaker seeking to mine it to make new therapies, per the Washington Post, which could be a data privacy nightmare in the making.

Said samples were willingly given by consumers in exchange for 23andMe to decode their DNA, a process that offered people a fascinating glimpse into their genetic makeup and family histories. That kind of biometric data is both wildly valuable and widely sought-after, so when 23andMe went belly-up financially, its trove of genetic information quickly drew attention as a lucrative asset. That realization immediately sparked concerns among data privacy experts, who warned that a sale of 23andMe data meant that the genetic information of customers, not to mention information about customers’ close and distant relatives, was up for grabs to the highest bidder.