Several risks are worth thinking through before purchasing a kit, separate from the accuracy concerns already described.

• Emotional impact without support. A result suggesting increased risk for a serious condition, or an unexpected finding such as a previously unknown relative or a surprise about family relationships, can arrive with no genetic counselor available to help a person process it, unlike a clinical test where pre-test counseling sets expectations in advance.
• False reassurance. A reassuring result can be just as harmful as a frightening one if it leads a person to skip a screening test or a genetic counseling referral that their family history would otherwise call for. A negative direct-to-consumer result for a handful of variants does not mean a person’s family history of a condition should be disregarded.
• Data privacy and long-term data use. A saliva sample and the DNA data generated from it are highly personal and permanent; they cannot be changed the way a password can. Consumers should read a company’s consent terms carefully to understand whether their data may be used for research, shared with pharmaceutical or insurance partners, or retained indefinitely, and what happens to that data if the company is acquired, changes ownership, or goes out of business. Recent, widely reported events involving a major direct-to-consumer testing company entering bankruptcy proceedings, with millions of customers’ genetic profiles among its assets, illustrate that this is not a hypothetical concern.
• No regulatory oversight equivalent to clinical laboratories in most cases. In India, there is currently no dedicated law specifically governing direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Existing frameworks, such as the Clinical Establishments Act and Medical Device Rules, apply only partially, and many products marketed online as “wellness” or “lifestyle” genetic tests fall outside meaningful oversight entirely. The Indian Academy of Medical Genetics has noted that quality assurance standards equivalent to those required of accredited clinical genetic testing laboratories do not exist for most of these products.
• Testing of children. Direct-to-consumer kits are sometimes purchased for children out of curiosity or concern, but professional guidelines generally advise against predictive or carrier testing of minors for adult-onset conditions outside a clinical setting, since this removes the child’s own future ability to decide whether they want that information, and a young person cannot meaningfully participate in informed consent for this kind of finding.

None of this means direct-to-consumer testing is inherently harmful for every use, particularly for lower-stakes purposes such as ancestry. It does mean that going in with clear expectations, and treating any medically significant finding as a starting point rather than an endpoint, protects against most of the realistic downsides.