If You’ve Ever Used Promethease, Your DNA Data Can Now Be on MyHeritage
When it comes to ways to learn about your DNA, Promethease seems to be one of the safest. They promised to be anonymous and to delete your report after 45 days. But now that MyHeritage has bought the company, users are notified that their DNA data is now on MyHeritage. What to expect?
It turns out that even though Promethease was deleting reports as promised after 45 days, if you created an account, the service retained your raw data. You now have a MyHeritage account that you can delete if you want. Check your email. This is how I found out about mine.
What Promethease Does
A while ago I downloaded my raw data from 23andme and handed it over to Promethease to see what might be interesting in my DNA. Ever since 23andme stopped providing detailed health-related results in 2013, Promethease has been a smart alternative. They used to charge $ 5 (now up to $ 12, but that’s still a steal) and didn’t try to explain your results to you. Instead, you could just look at which SNPs you had – these are the regions where your DNA differs from the DNA of other people – and read SNPedia , a kind of genetic wikipedia, about what those SNPs might mean.
This means that Promethease has access to the raw file you gave it (which you might get from 23andme, Ancestry, or another service) and the SNP report it generated for you. You had the opportunity to pay your royalties, download the report and never deal with the company again; or you can create an account so you can “recreate” your report in the future without having to pay again. This means they saved your unprocessed DNA file. Here’s what their privacy policy says:
If you choose not to create an account, Promethease will delete your DNA data file after 24 hours. All DNA data files uploaded prior to August 28, 2017 have been deleted. If you create an account, Promethease will keep your DNA data file until you delete it from Promethease. You can log into your account at any time, and as long as your DNA data file is stored in Promethease, you can re-generate the report for free with the latest data from SNPedia, or delete your DNA. Data file forever.
I bet that many Promethease users, like myself, considered this service to be unique, which we might forget about later. If that was your intention but you created an account, you need to go to Promethease and / or MyHeritage and delete your data.
How to delete your account
In the classic digital hell of 2020 fashion, you must create your MyHeritage account to be able to delete it. This is how Promethease’s privacy policy describes it:
Once you have created your MyHeritage account as described above [European user data not copied], you will be notified by email. You will then be able to manage your copied DNA data files on the MyHeritage website under a secure, private account (created using the email address associated with your Promethease account), accessible only to you, and receive free additional services (free DNA Family Matching and free ethnicity assessments). You will always own your DNA data file (MyHeritage does not claim ownership of the DNA data file). Your Promethease account will remain active and you can continue to use it. You will be able to delete your DNA Data File and / or MyHeritage account at any time (by continuing to use Promethease if you wish). MyHeritage will deduplicate the DNA data file so that DNA data files that have already been separately uploaded to MyHeritage by the same users will no longer be copied to MyHeritage.
I received an email from MyHeritage and clicked on the link. Here’s what greeted me:
Promethease was anonymous, but it needs your name (I entered no on both lines) and agreement to the new terms and privacy policy. Ugh. Then you will move on to the ethnicity assessment animation. Click “Skip” in the upper right corner if you don’t want to see; estimates are not necessarily accurate, but it can get a lot of tricky feelings if you don’t get the results you expect (people have discovered frustrating family secrets with something as simple as DNA ethnicity analysis, so consider yourself forewarned).
From there, click the MyHeritage logo to go to the dashboard (it tells me my DNA overlaps with 6033 other users, great, I didn’t ask for that) and then click your profile in the top right corner to go to your privacy settings. Among other things, I didn’t ask: DNA matches are included and people who match me can view my ethnicity assessment.
I turned off everything I could find, but I couldn’t figure out if my data was available to other people for matching and searching, or if it was only a minute earlier when I created the account. I tried to call support but received a message that only paying customers are eligible for phone support. I have submitted a request via the website and will let you know if they respond. In the meantime, at least I was able to delete my account as promised.
Here’s how to remove what you can:
- Go to My Profile on MyHerittge and you will see your DNA “kit” (which is the raw data file). Click “Manage” and then you can delete the bundle.
- Go to Account Settings and at the bottom of the page you can delete your account.
- If you also want to delete your Promethease account, login to Promethease and click on the three-dot menu next to your kit. Select “Delete DNA Files”.
However, MyHeritage does not permit searches by law enforcement agencies or for the purpose of solving crimes , unless required by a court order. They do not offer a transparency report with information on court orders.