23andMe has filed for bankruptcy to sell itself, which means any data they hold about you is going to change hands soon. If you're worried about your privacy don't rush in and delete your account - scramble it first. This way, any residual data they retain after deletion will be useless too 🧵
Mar 24, 2025 10:40Change your name, email, date of birth, ethnicity, sex marker, height, weight, birthplace, heritage, post code, etc to something real-looking but fake. Request that your samples be destroyed, withdraw consent from studies, disable ancestry, leave the beta program. Disconnect social logins.
Don't put junk like "lksgjhsdflkg" into the fields either. It's easy to filter and detect. Instead, use tools like
generatedata.com to roll credible values, just remember to make a note of things you may need for security questions later!
generatedata.com
generatedata.com: free, random test data generator
If you're feeling paranoid, make multiple changes over several days to help flush out logs, or at least make it difficult for someone to come along later and work out what's real from what's fake.
Request copies of all your data too, more than once if you like, and download it if you want to keep a copy. Storage costs money over time, so this could help flush out any old copies with your valid data still attached as metadata.
When you're done, go through the account deletion process. All this stuff maximises the probability of your data being erased and renders anything that's retained either unusable or prohibitively time-consuming to reconstruct.
