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  • 2017-05-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Can Ancestry.com Take Ownership of Your DNA Data? (en)
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  • On 17 May 2017, Joel Winston, a consumer protection attorney and former deputy attorney general of New Jersey, published a blog post with the claim that the genealogy website Ancestry.com was taking DNA ownership rights from customers and their families: The article has caused widespread concern and prompted a public response from Ancestry.com’s Chief Privacy Officer Eric Heath, who called Winston’s post inflammatory and inaccurate. In response to our questions, Heath emphasized that Ancestry.com does not take ownership of your DNA; rather, you license it to them: Several documents control customers’ agreements with Ancestry.com: the terms and conditions, an informed consent agreement, and the privacy policy. Before signing up for the DNA test, Heath says, you can also opt out of allowing your DNA data to be used for research, whether academic or commercial, when signing the informed consent agreement: Heath added that you can revoke any license you give Ancestry.com to use and distribute your DNA by deleting the data or closing your Ancestry.com account: However, Winston objects to this distinction: Omri Ben-Shahar, a University of Chicago law professor and an expert in contracts and consumer protection pointed to the same opt-outs that Heath did, saying: Even if a customer left every opt-out unclicked, and gave Ancestry.com full permission to do anything they were legally entitled to do with your data, Ben-Shahar says that it still be licensed, not owned, and you can still legally retract it at any time. In his blog post, Winston also pointed out that customers can revoke their consent at any time. However, he directed us towards a section of the AncestryDNA informed consent agreement that addresses the potential risks of signing up for the DNA test: As Ancestry.com explains in the informed consent agreement, the fact that they remove identifying information from your DNA data before they add it to their database does not remove this risk: Jeff Sovern, a law professor at St John’s University in New York City and an expert in consumer law, told us the circumstances under which Ancestry.com might share your DNA data with others could be wider than they first appear. One significant section of the Terms and Conditions read as follows (until it was changed in light of the May 2017 controversy): The company no longer describes the license as perpetual, and the phrase to the extent and in the form or context we deem appropriate has been removed: Jeff Sovern said that the privacy statement’s use of examples, rather than an exhaustive list of scenarios in which user’s information can be shared, makes him nervous: Signing up for Ancestry.com’s DNA test does not mean that the company owns your DNA data, in the complete and permanent way in which that word is typically understood. Customers license it to the company. Customers can choose not to allow their genetic information to be used for certain purposes, and can also revoke the license and have the DNA data and sample destroyed if they wish — something that would not be possible if Ancestry.com owned them outright. However, granting Ancestry.com that license can involve giving them relatively significant rights over DNA data, and the scope of these rights may go beyond what is immediately apparent. Furthermore, licensing your DNA data to Ancestry.com does come with risks to your privacy, as well as potentially resulting in problems obtaining life insurance or, in certain circumstances, even getting hired for a particular job. (en)
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