By: Christopher Perry, CEO — Pretty Fluid Technologies

In March 2025, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company that built a business on collecting, analyzing, and commercializing the genetic data of more than 15 million people was now in financial distress, and its most valuable asset — that genetic database — was on the table.

The bankruptcy filing included a provision that the genetic data could be sold as part of the company’s assets. Regulators in several states issued guidance urging customers to delete their data before a sale could occur. The California Attorney General reminded consumers that under state law, they had the right to request deletion. But the practical reality is that most people do not read bankruptcy filings, most people do not issue deletion requests, and even those who do have no way to verify that deletion was actually carried out.

This is the data ownership problem in its starkest form.

When you sign up for a consumer service and provide personal data — especially data as irreversible and uniquely identifying as your genetic sequence — you are not owning that data. You are licensing it to a company under terms that can change, under ownership that can transfer, under legal structures that can fail. The privacy policy you agreed to may be worth nothing when a bankruptcy court is deciding what to sell.

At Pretty Fluid Technologies, we built Zentinel around a different premise: data should be encrypted before it ever reaches our infrastructure, and the keys should stay with the person the data belongs to. We cannot sell what we cannot read. We cannot hand over what we do not hold.

The 23andMe bankruptcy is not a cautionary tale about a single company’s business failures. It is a cautionary tale about what it means to trust a company with data that cannot be changed, recalled, or taken back once it is out of your hands. Genetic data is permanent. The company you gave it to is not.