Privacy

Crick has no accounts and no logins. We do not ask who you are, and we have no way to identify you across visits beyond the analytics described below.

If you use the 23andMe analyzer, your genetic data never leaves your browser. Your file is read and parsed on your own machine. Only the identifiers of the variants to look up — values like rs334 — are sent to our server. Your actual genotype calls are not transmitted, stored, logged or cached anywhere.

Crick keeps a small amount of state in your browser’s local storage so the site can remember where you are in a task. It never leaves your device and we cannot read it:

• Which path through the site you chose
• When you first and last visited, and how many times
• How many trials you have viewed or saved

Clearing your browser’s site data removes all of it. Nothing here is tied to a name, an email address, or an account.

Your raw data file is parsed entirely in your browser. The file itself is never uploaded.

To find out what is known about your variants, the analyzer sends a list of variant identifiers (rsIDs) to our server, which asks the public ClinVar database at the US National Institutes of Health what each one means. ClinVar receives only the identifiers.

Your genotypes — the part of the file that is specific to you — stay in your browser. The results you see are assembled on your own machine by combining what ClinVar says about each variant with the genotypes already there.

We keep a cache of what ClinVar reports about a given variant, so repeated lookups are faster. That cache contains only public information about variants. It contains nothing about you.

Messages sent through the contact form are delivered by Web3Forms, a third-party service. The name, email address, subject and message you type are passed to them in order to reach our inbox, and are subject to their privacy policy as well as this one.

Please do not send personal health information through this form. It is a general contact channel, not a secure or clinical one.

Crick uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are used. This sets cookies in your browser and shares your IP address with Google. It tells us how the site is used in aggregate; it does not tell us who you are.

Browser “Do Not Track” settings, ad blockers and privacy extensions all prevent it, and the site works normally without it.

Crick is a front end to public scientific databases. When you search or open a page, our server queries them on your behalf, so those services see requests from us rather than from you. The sources are ClinicalTrials.gov, PubChem, ClinVar and other NCBI services, Open Targets, and ChEMBL at the EMBL-EBI.

Some things load directly in your browser, which means those providers see your IP address: map tiles from OpenStreetMap on trial location maps, fonts from Google Fonts, and map icons from cdnjs.

When you use the “Plain English” button on a trial page, that trial’s published eligibility criteria are sent to Anthropic’s API to be rewritten. That text is public information from the trial record. Nothing about you is included.

• No accounts, logins or passwords
• No selling or sharing of data with advertisers
• No storing of your genetic data
• No profile of you across visits beyond browser analytics

Crick is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your data, the date at the top will change. Crick is under active development, and we would rather update this page than let it go stale.

Questions about any of this can go through the contact form.