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After going public in 2021, 23andMe has now filed for bankruptcy protection. The company faced a lawsuit last year that claimed customer information was not adequately protected.
If you’re from the UK, there’s a high likelihood that either you or a relative has used 23andMe in the past ten or fifteen years.
23andMe offers various different services to better understand your health or family history using sample DNA. Customers simply order a kit to be delivered to their home, spit into a sample tube that comes pre-packaged, then mail back the results to be analysed.
Three main products are offered, including ‘Ancestry Service,’ ‘Health + Ancestry Service’ and ‘23andMe+ Premium’.
These types of companies were all the rage for a brief period around a decade ago, before data breaches were common and when consumer trust in personal data submission was still relatively high.
At its peak, 23andMe was valued at £4.6 billion, though it has never turned a profit – even after going public in 2021.
Now, the company has filed for bankruptcy protection. Its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has also resigned with immediate effect. In a statement, 23andMe said it would still be operating as it tries to sell itself under the supervision of a court. It mentioned that there are ‘no changes to the way the company stores, manages, or protects company data.’
A lawsuit was settled in September 2024 that alleged a failure to protect customer privacy. Seven million consumers had their data exposed in a 2023 breach. While these are common with tech firms, 23andMe’s is particularly concerning as the information it stores is extremely personal.
Hackers gained access to family trees, birth years and geographic locations by using old password information, though no DNA records were included.
