23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company, profits twice when users buy their testing kits: once when the user buys the kit and again when they sell aggregate user data to pharmaceutical companies.

But you deserve to know where your data goes when you use direct-to-consumer genetic tests. The company wants you to believe that you are safe because they don’t directly sell individual data. But genetic data is unalterable and highly specific. Even in selling aggregate data, 23andMe risks the safety of its users and their families. Throughout history, institutions have violated the autonomy and privacy of Black people to make supposed scientific discoveries or develop medical treatments, while keeping us from accessing the benefits. Every user to whom 23andMe markets their product deserves to understand what they’re signing up for: how 23andMe might use their data and how it might be used by other sites that customers later share their reports with (i.e. inadvertent data sharing with law enforcement databases).

Black people seek out products like 23andMe’s because enslavement made it nearly impossible to track family ancestry. As a company profiting from sensitive information that has yet to be meaningfully protected and regulated, 23andMe has a responsibility to Black customers to adequately inform them of the implications of completing a genetic test. And in the meantime, 23andMe cannot continue to recruit more Black users for their products to expand their data inventory without creating meaningful protections for genetic privacy and acknowledging the enhanced risk for Black people. Black people deserve to learn more about who and where we came from without compromising our safety and right to privacy.

To live up to their value that “behind every data point is a human being,” 23andMe must stop profiting from pharmaceutical partnerships that expose highly sensitive genetic information.

Here is the Petition:

Anne Wojcicki,

We are concerned about 23andMe’s commitment to profits over people. With data as sensitive as unalterable genetic information, 23andMe has an enhanced responsibility to care for its Black users’ data.

From the linked histories of enslavement and medical experimentation, Black people deserve to learn more about who and where we came from without compromising their safety.

23andMe owes Black users explicit and ongoing proof of how its model differs from the pharmaceutical companies and medical institutions that have exploited our bodies since enslavement.