A University of Iowa legal scholar who’s an expert on genetic privacy says the thousands of Iowans who used the genetic testing company 23andMe may have dodged a bullet with its recent bankruptcy, but she fears repeats with similar companies.
UI law professor Anya Prince says the genetic data of some 15-million customers nationwide appears to have emerged from the company’s financial challenges with all security measures intact.
“What happened in the bankruptcy proceeding is that the winning bidder for the data and the company was a company called TTAM, which actually stands for 23andMe,” Prince says. “It’s a nonprofit entity owned by the original co-founder of 23andMe, and that company has promised to keep the same services, keep the same employees.”
If it had fallen into the wrong corporate hands, Prince says that genetic data could have been used in ways customers of 23andMe never intended…