Privacy
This page describes the mechanism rather than making a promise, because a mechanism can be checked and a promise cannot. The source is public and the network traffic is visible in your browser's developer tools.
Where your query goes
VarInsight is a static site. When you look a variant up, your browser calls three public APIs directly:
myvariant.info— identity, ClinVar assertions, allele frequencygnomad.broadinstitute.org— gene constraintwww.ebi.ac.uk— Europe PMC literature
A fourth is contacted only sometimes. If you enter a notation this tool cannot parse itself — an Ensembl transcript or LRG string such asENST00000357654.9:c.68_69delAG — your browser asks Ensembl to resolve it to a genomic coordinate, at rest.ensembl.org for GRCh38 orgrch37.rest.ensembl.org for GRCh37. Every other lookup — every rsID, coordinate, RefSeq HGVS and gene-plus-change — is parsed on your own machine and never reaches Ensembl. The result says so when Ensembl was used.
Those requests go from your machine to those services. They are not proxied, relayed or logged by us, because there is no server of ours in the path to do it — the site is files on a CDN and every lookup happens in your browser. The three services can of course see what you asked them and the IP address you asked from, exactly as they would if you visited them yourself. Their privacy policies are linked from thesources page.
What we store
Nothing. There is no database, no session, no account, no cookie and no local storage. There is no analytics of any kind — not page views, not variant lookups, not error reporting. Closing the tab ends everything.
What is in the address bar
After a lookup the URL carries your query, so the page can be linked and reloaded. That means it enters your browser history, and it is visible to anyone you send the link to. Nothing is transmitted by that URL until you open it, but if you are looking up a variant that identifies a person, treat the link as you would the variant.
Fonts and assets
Fonts are served from this site rather than from a font CDN, so loading a page does not announce you to a third party. There are no embeds, tags, pixels or scripts from anyone else — the only JavaScript on the site is the lookup itself.
Exports
The HTML and Markdown downloads are assembled in your browser and saved by your browser. They are not uploaded anywhere and never leave your machine unless you send them.