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 hosts directly:
eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov— dbSNP, which turns what you typed into one variant; ClinVar, for the clinical significance and for each individual submission behind it; and PubMed, for the subjects the papers naming the variant are indexed under, with MeSH itself asked which of those headings name a condition. Each request carries the variant and nothing else: no key, no identifier of you, and no address, because there is none to send that would not be yours.gnomad.broadinstitute.org— allele frequency and its ancestry breakdown, the computational prediction scores, the per-transcript consequences, and gene constraint.www.ebi.ac.uk— Europe PMC literature, and the GWAS Catalog trait associations. The catalogue is asked only when the variant has a dbSNP rsID, because an rsID is the only thing its API can be searched by.
api.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov is contacted for two input types. If you enter an HGVS description against a transcript, or a gene and a coding change, your browser asks NCBI where that change sits on the genome — and, for a gene and a change, which transcript the gene’s changes are numbered against by default. An rsID or a coordinate needs neither.
And if you enter a notation this tool cannot parse itself — an Ensembl transcript or LRG string such as ENST00000357654.9:c.68_69delAG — your browser asks Ensembl to resolve it to a genomic coordinate, at rest.ensembl.org for GRCh38 or grch37.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.
The same host answers when two services place one variant at different positions — routine for an insertion or deletion inside a repeat, where several placements are equally correct — and your browser asks which form they both reduce to. That request carries the variant's coordinates and bases and nothing else.
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. Those 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 the sources page.
What we store
One thing, and it is not about you or about what you looked up: the key varinsight-theme in your browser's local storage, holding the word light or dark, written only if you use the theme switch in the header. It never leaves your device, and clearing site data removes it.
Nothing else. There is no database, no session, no account and no cookie. No query, no variant and no identifier is stored anywhere, by us or on your machine. There is no analytics of any kind — not page views, not variant lookups, not error reporting. Closing the tab ends everything else.
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. There are two scripts, both ours and both served from this site: the lookup, and the thirty lines that read the theme key above.
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.