[eaurouge]

> What do you do with my data?

> Your privacy is a top priority for us. Our test will pick up some of your DNA - it’s impossible to completely avoid - but we only look at the microbes from your saliva and we take steps in our workflow to throw out human data during analysis.

Can you do better than this? What exactly do you do with the data? What do you store? How do you store it? What do you throw away? When do you throw it away?

[david_l_lin]

Short of giving away some of our secret sauce and analysis pipeline, what we do is sequence the nucleic acids in your saliva in a de-identified fashion such that only Bristle scientists can match your sequence data with any potential identifiers. As data comes off the sequencer, we use a bioinformatic pipeline to remove 98%+ of human genetic data prior to any analysis such that its impossible to derive meaningful genetic information from the sample. The end result is that we effectively store only microbiome sequence data and not your personal genetic data. We store all of your data in accordance with HIPAA guidelines.

Your de-identfiied data (metadata and microbiome data) may be used in aggregate analysis to mine for novel biomarkers of disease, and to develop novel therapeutics targeting the oral microbiome for the treatment of disease.

[jabyess]

Why not put all this info on the site?

[david_l_lin]

That's a great suggestion, we'll work on getting this added to our list of FAQs.

[verdverm]

Is the data really de-identified?

Would our microbiome data be a sort of fingerprint?