Privacy

Understand Your Genome is run by Charles Imbusch as a private individual — not a company. For anything about privacy, your data, or this policy, write to [email protected].

• Your email, to create your account and sign you in.
• The genetic file you upload (VCF or 23andMe export) and the annotations we generate from it — this is why the service exists.
• Nothing else, by default. If you turn on email notifications, we use your email to tell you when a file is done processing — nothing more.
• If you send us feedback, we keep the message and, if you chose to give one, the email you provided with it.

Genetic data is about as personal as data gets, and we treat it that way. Processing it requires your explicit go-ahead — the checkbox you tick before uploading — and it's used for exactly one thing: producing your annotated report. It is never used to train any model, never analyzed in aggregate, and never looked at by us unless you explicitly ask us to help you with something.

Annotation itself runs entirely against reference databases (ClinVar, dbSNP, gnomAD, SNPedia, and others) that we download and keep on our own infrastructure. Your file is never sent to any third-party API or external service to be annotated — the comparison happens locally, against our own copy of that public data.

Only you, while signed into your own account. Access is enforced at the database level (row-level security), not just hidden in the interface — and this applies to administrators of this site too: admin accounts can see membership and job status for support purposes, but have no access path to the contents of anyone's results. That's a deliberate design choice, not a policy we're merely promising to follow.

On infrastructure we run and control directly — not a third-party cloud genetics platform, not shared with data brokers, not sold, ever. Files are encrypted in storage.

For as long as you want. Delete a single upload from your dashboard, or wipe everything at once from Account & your data — either way it's a real deletion of the underlying file and results, not a hide switch. If you'd like your account itself closed entirely, email [email protected] and we'll take care of it.

• No analytics or tracking cookies — we don't run any third-party analytics at all.
• No advertising, and no marketing emails beyond what you've explicitly asked for.
• No automated decisions made about you — everything here is informational, for you to read and act on (or not) as you choose.

Whatever the specifics of the law where you live, we'll honor the same baseline: you can ask what we hold about you, correct it, get a copy of it, or have it deleted — most of which you can already do yourself from your account page. For anything else, email [email protected].

This service isn't intended for anyone under 18 — genetic results deserve the judgment of an adult, ideally alongside a doctor or genetic counselor for anything that raises a real question.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll say so here with a visible date. This version: September 2026.