Fredericton cybersecurity expert urges 23andMe users to delete data now

CBC News

· Posted: Mar 27, 2025 10:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 11 minutes ago

Customers of a troubled online work that helps radical larn astir their ancestry and offers insights into their wellness could present beryllium vulnerable, a Fredericton cybersecurity adept says.

The familial investigating company 23andMe, famous for its saliva-based DNA investigating kits, has filed for bankruptcy and is looking to merchantability "substantially all" of its assets.

But anyone who whitethorn person utilized the work should take enactment now, says David Shipley, CEO of Beauceron Security.

Shipley, who said helium has utilized the website himself, urges all users to log into their accounts and delete their information due to the fact that of the unknowns astir a imaginable sale.

"This is the astir intimate and idiosyncratic accusation available, right?" Shipley said in an interrogation with CBC's Shift.

"Not lone is it a idiosyncratic identifier successful the astir eventual sense, but it besides tin beryllium a predictor of existent oregon aboriginal health. And this accusation could beryllium utilized successful ways that individuals whitethorn not privation oregon consent to being used."

"You tin alteration a password, you can't alteration your DNA."

Shipley said he's acrophobic the national authorities has failed to walk a integer charter, which would person included "fundamental rights which we presently don't have" successful presumption of privateness with this benignant of data.   

The worst-case script with 23andMe, Shipley said, would beryllium if a large wellness insurer bought the data. 

"And you know, it benignant of leads them to judge that you shouldn't get wellness security successful the future," Shipley said. "Or adjacent worse, that your children mightiness beryllium predisposed to definite conditions and frankincense either should person to wage much oregon beryllium denied sum due to the fact that of that."

"Other examples see selling your DNA accusation to databases that instrumentality enforcement and others enactment with."

Although the 23andME has agreed not to merchantability idiosyncratic data, Shipley said the company's filing for bankruptcy extortion and past being sold would undo that.

"It's a clever small ineligible mode of getting astir immoderate of those 'We won't ever merchantability your information clauses.'"

Despite the information that 23andme had a information breach successful 2023, Shipley said, this menace of a merchantability has led to a infinitesimal wherever he's "never seen arsenic large of a unreserved to get your information disconnected of those services arsenic rapidly arsenic possible."

But the risk of idiosyncratic information being sold should not undermine the usefulness that 23andme had for immoderate people, helium said. 

"It's not to accidental this thought of knowing much astir yourself is inherently ever atrocious oregon not worthy the risk. It's the question of however bash we marque it amended and safer for radical to payment from these technologies?"