Spend enough time online and you’ll collect a digital paper trail of accounts, logins, subscriptions, mailing lists and passwords that boil down to data breaches. A new start is called Yorba can help you get a better handle on your ever-expanding digital footprint with the launch of its multipurpose tool for decluttering your online life. From its online control panel, you can organize, monitor and manage your online accounts, unsubscribe from mailing lists, cancel subscriptions, review privacy policies and more.
The end result is something of a mint for your entire online life, so to speak.
The analogy to the older personal finance tracker is apt because, like Mint, Yorba doesn’t keep any of your data itself. Instead, it works by connecting to your online accounts, like your Gmail, and soon other online services and cloud storage providers. Yorba scans your email using natural language processing and machine learning techniques to discover your digital “relationships” — that is, the accounts you have, the services you’ve subscribed to, and the mailing lists you’re on. You can also connect with financial institutions through Plaid integrationand import accounts via CSV.
Image Credits: Yorba
From the Yorba dashboard, you can see statistics about how you interact with your various accounts and make decisions about what actions to take — such as resetting a password found in a data breach, canceling accounts due to weak their privacy policy, unsubscribe from a mailing list that sends you spam, and more.
Explains co-founder and CEO Chris Zeunstrom, “Our goal right now is to bring all these things together and give ideas and then slowly be able to build tools that are actionable directly from Yorba.”
Image Credits: Yorba
Zeunstrom says he was inspired to work on the project after struggling to focus due to an overload of emails on multiple accounts.
“These emails are key points of vulnerability that could be compromised,” he notes. Zeunstrom had started using a password manager to try to control his accounts, but found that didn’t solve the problem.
“[Password managers] they’re good at concentrating the bloat, but they don’t help you reduce it,” she tells us. “We need something almost like a Fitbit for digital relationships. We see Yorba as a relationship manager and trying to build better relationships between people and on the platforms they use,” adds Zeunstrom.
Some of the features offered by Yorba may not be unique.
There are already tools to unsubscribe from mailing lists, such as Unraveling. Me or even Gmail’s built-in unsubscribe feature. Services like Rocket Money (formerly Truebill) can manage and cancel subscriptions. But what makes Yorba different is that it puts all these features and more under one roof.
Image Credits: Yorba
In addition to mailing list and subscription management, Yorba can also alert you to accounts related to data breaches, a feature that password managers also offer, and can help you discover old accounts you no longer use, view statistics about things like how often an account sends you emails and how often you actually open those emails.
It can even analyze a company’s privacy policy and offer a score based on how invasive or unethical it is. (The latter is provided in collaboration with an Amsterdam-based non-profit organization, “Terms of use; I didn’t read.The organization is working on applying machine learning to read and rate privacy policies, which are then reviewed by a human reviewer at the end.)
Yorba originally started three years ago as more of a research project, before incorporating as a non-profit and launching private beta last year.
Image Credits: Yorba
What makes Yorba attractive, beyond its functionality, is its ease of use. This is because the team includes those with a UI/UX background, as the project was originally funded by Zeunstrom’s design firm, Ruca. Instead of raising venture capital, Yorba is funded through Ruca’s “return model.” Essentially, this means that when Ruca signs a contract with a customer, a portion of that revenue goes into a fund that is distributed to other companies.
Zeunstrom has since moved away from New York-based Ruca to run Yorba full time from Lisbon, he says.
Yorba’s team also includes co-founder and CTO David Schmudde and CDO Nolan Cabeje. Zeunstrom had originally connected with Schmudde when he was trying to recruit him for an earlier political tech startup, Advocate.io. Although Schmudde turned down that job, his interest in data privacy led him to join Yorba several years later. Cabeje, meanwhile, hails from Ruca.
The company plans to expand its reach with new services and features in the coming months. Explores integrations with other services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Proton Drive, and more. In addition, he works with Tim Berners-Lee’s Solidso everyone could bring their own data into Yorba in time — but without Yorba storing the data itself, acting only as an organizational layer.
Image Credits: Yorba
Later this spring, Yorba will also release a feature linked to Data Rights Protocol efforts to standardize consumer data rights requests, such as account deletions; This new feature will be similar to Just Delete Me service, which guides consumers on how to delete their accounts on approximately 1,500 websites and services. Yorba, however, will support 10,000 sites in deleting their account directly.
Down the line, the company aims to add features that will let you update your mailing address with companies when you move, as well as your credit card information when you get a new card.
Since launching in public beta last month, Yorba has over 1,000 users, 160 of whom are premium subscribers. The Premium plan is $6 per month, billed annually, and offers active data breach monitoring, subscription management, and unlimited actions to manage your online accounts.
“Basically it’s expensive to build so we can make enough money to sustain ourselves so we don’t need investors,” says Zeunstrom.
Yorba is free to use for basic functions like account scanning, however.
