Who Owns Your DNA After a Test?

The short answer is that you, the customer, technically “own” your genetic data under every major consumer company’s terms of service. The longer and more useful answer is that ownership in this context is not what most people assume it means. We unpack what the standard language actually grants the company, and what the 23andMe situation in 2025 demonstrated about the gap between the legal phrasing and the practical reality.

What the terms of service actually say

The major consumer companies (AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA) state in their terms of service that the customer retains ownership of their genetic information. That is not a meaningful statement on its own, because the same documents grant the company a broad license to use that information.

The standard license, in plain English, typically allows the company to:

• Process, store, and analyze your genotype data to provide the service you signed up for.
• Use de-identified or aggregated data for product improvement and research.
• Share de-identified data with research partners, subject to your separate research consent.
• Transfer your data to a successor entity in the event of a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, or asset sale.

Read carefully, “you own it” coexists with “we can do most things with it.” That is not necessarily nefarious. Without those rights, the company could not actually run the service. But it is what the ownership language amounts to.

The 23andMe-TTAM case study

The 2025 transfer is the concrete example of how ownership works when a company changes hands. In March 2025, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its genetic data and core operating assets were sold to TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit founded by 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, in mid-2025. The wind-down plan was approved by the bankruptcy court later that year.

Three points are worth noting.

The transfer happened under the asset-sale provisions in the original terms of service, which users had accepted at signup. The bankruptcy court approved the sale, and a customer who had not deleted their account by then had their data move to TTAM by default.

State attorneys general weighed in during the bankruptcy proceeding, raising concerns about the genetic data of users who had not actively chosen to be transferred. Several states required additional notice and consent protections as a condition of the sale.

TTAM is a nonprofit, which has its own implications for the data going forward, but the structural point stands: a corporate change moved millions of users’ genetic data to a new entity through a process most users could not directly veto except by deleting beforehand.

For the detailed timeline, see 23andMe data sale to TTAM, explained.

Sample versus data: two separate things

A practical complication that is often missed. The physical saliva sample and the digital genotype data are stored separately, and most companies retain the sample after analysis unless you opt out.

That means “ownership” of your data is one question, and what happens to your physical biological sample is another. Deleting your account in most cases does not automatically destroy the sample. You have to request that separately. The exact policy varies by company; see DNA test privacy policies compared for the matrix.

What you can actually do

Three concrete actions follow from the gap between “you own it” and the practical license you grant.

Read the consent screens at signup. The research-participation opt-in is separate from the basic terms. You can decline research without losing access to your results.

Download your raw data. The single most useful hedge against a future ownership change is having your own copy of the file. See how to download your raw DNA data.

Use the deletion process if your situation changes. Deletion is not retroactive (it cannot recall data already shared under your prior consent), but it stops future processing and removes the data from the company’s live systems going forward. See how to delete your 23andMe data and how to delete your AncestryDNA data.

A more honest framing

“Ownership” is a borrowed metaphor that does not fit genetic data cleanly. You cannot lock it up the way you lock up a physical possession, because copies multiply (research partners, downloaded files you have shared, third-party services you uploaded to). And you cannot make decisions about it in isolation, because your genome is partially the genome of your relatives.

The realistic framing is that you have a set of choices at signup, a set of controls during use, and a set of remedies after the fact. The companies’ terms structure what is available in each, and the 2025 events showed how much can change under those terms when the company itself changes hands.

For the related questions, see can DNA test data be sold, what happens to DNA data if a company shuts down, and genetic data and insurance, GINA explained.

This piece is part of our Genetic Data Privacy guide.