Your raw DNA file never leaves your device

A raw DNA file from 23andMe, AncestryDNA, or MyHeritage holds hundreds of thousands of genetic markers. It is one of the few pieces of data about you that can never be changed. You can rotate a password and replace a credit card. You cannot rotate your genome.

The standard model in this industry is simple and, we think, wrong: you upload the entire file to someone's server, and from then on you are trusting their storage, their retention policy, their staff, and every future breach they might have.

How Helisoma reads your file

When you add your DNA file to Helisoma, the file is opened and parsed by JavaScript running in your own browser, on your own device. The parser finds the specific markers our reports actually use and extracts only those.

Only that small extract, well under a megabyte, is sent to our server to build your report. The raw file itself is never uploaded, never stored, and never seen by us. There is no server endpoint that accepts it.

What we keep is exactly two things: the extracted markers, and the trait reports we generate from them. Both are yours to delete at any time from your account settings, and deleting them means we no longer hold your genetic data at all.

Why this design costs us something

Parsing in the browser is harder to build than a plain file upload. Every DNA provider formats its files differently, browsers have memory limits, and we cannot quietly fix a parsing bug on the server because the parsing does not happen there.

We chose it anyway, for one reason: the best way to protect data is to never possess it. A server that never receives your raw genome cannot leak it, cannot be subpoenaed for it, and cannot be tempted to find a new business model for it.

The fine print, in plain words

Genetic data is special category data under UK and EU law, which means we only touch the extracted markers after you give explicit consent, and you can withdraw that consent whenever you want. The details, including the exact list of what we store and who our processors are, live in our Privacy Policy. It is written to be read, not to be scrolled past.

If you have a question about any of this, email us. The person answering is the person who built it. And if you want to see it in action, add your raw file here and watch the network tab: the file stays home.