Washington residents affected by a genetic testing company breach will benefit from millions in combined settlements aimed at accountability and consumer relief.
The genetic testing company 23andMe has agreed to an $18 million multistate settlement resolving claims from the 2023 incident, says the Washington Attorney General.
The lawsuit was launched because 23andMe allegedly engaged in unreasonable data security practices that failed to protect sensitive genetic information.
“In October 2023, direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe announced that it had discovered a data breach in which 6.9 million consumers were affected, including 221,401 in Washington. This data breach exposed a wide range of data about 23andMe customers, including in some cases genetic ancestry information, and subsets of this data were subsequently published for sale on the dark web.”
The coalition of 42 attorneys general accused the company of failing to employ safeguards against credential stuffing attacks, remediate known vulnerabilities, implement logging and monitoring or other tools likely to detect a data breach or properly investigate unusual login patterns.
According to the complaint, 23andMe learned about the breach months after data was publicly available and initially denied responsibility while blaming consumers.
Washington will receive $547,000 as its portion to enforce consumer protection laws following the exposure of data from over 220,000 state residents.
A separate national class action settlement of $46.8 million provides direct payouts to eligible consumers.
The deals ensure stronger protections for sensitive data in the future.
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