This week's episode, I chat with Chris Zeunstrom, the Founder and CEO of Ruca and Yorba. Ruca is a global design cooperative and founder support network, while Yorba is a reverse CRM that aims to reduce your digital footprint and keep your personal information safe. Through his businesses, Chris focuses on solving common problems and creating innovative products. In our conversation, we talk about building a privacy-first company, the digital minimalist movement, and the future of decentralized identity and storage.
Chris shares his journey as a privacy-focused entrepreneur and his mission to prioritize privacy and decentralization in managing personal data. He also explains the digital minimalist movement and why its teachings reach beyond the industry. Chris touches on Yorba's collaboration with Consumer Reports to implement Permission Slip and creating a Data Rights Protocol ecosystem that automates data deletion for consumers. Chris also emphasizes the benefits of decentralized identity and storage solutions in improving personal privacy and security. Finally, he gives you a sneak peek at what's next in store for Yorba.
Topics Covered:
How Yorba was designed as a privacy-1st consumer CRM platform; the problems that Yorba solves; and key product functionality & privacy features
Why Chris decided to bring a consumer product to market for privacy rather than a B2B product
Why Chris incorporated Yorba as a 'Public Benefit Corporation' (PBC) and sought B Corp status
Exploring 'Digital Minimalism'
How Yorba's is working with Consumer Reports to advance the CR Data Rights Protocol, leveraging 'Permission Slip' - an authorized agent for consumers to submit data deletion requests
The architectural design decisions behind Yorba’s personal CRM system
The benefits to using Matomo Analytics or Fathom Analytics for greater privacy vs. using Google Analytics
The privacy benefits to deploying 'Decentralized Identity' & 'Decentralized Storage' architectures
Chris' vision for the next stage of the Internet; and, the future of Yorba
The goal that we have with Yorba is to be able to load something that looks like a personal profile that you can use as identifying an agent to connect to different platforms around the Internet; but, at the same time, that information that's stored for that is actually decentralized into all of these pods around the Internet. So, it would be very hard for you to ever break into that. There is no central source. There is no "We just broken and stole all these passwords or all these people's social security numbers, because everything would be broken down into these federated storage pods around the world, Right? So, we're just organizing, essentially, into an easy- to- digest interface and then when you log out it's gone again, back into its nodes. You can never really hack Yorba as the goal.
Debra J Farber:
Hello, I am Debra J Farber. Welcome to The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast, where we talk about embedding privacy by design and default into the engineering function to prevent privacy harms to humans and to prevent dystopia. Each week, we'll bring you unique discussions with global privacy technologists and innovators working at the bleeding- edge of privacy research and emerging technologies, standards, business models and ecosystems. Welcome everyone to the Shifting Privacy Left podcast. I'm your host and resident privacy guru, Debra J Farber. Today I'm delighted to welcome my next guest, Chris Zuenstrom.
Debra J Farber:
Chris is an American entrepreneur currently residing in Lisbon, Portugal. He is the owner of Crispy Strom Industries Inc. where he focuses on solving problems, creating products, and building businesses through the thoughtful application of design and technology. Chris is the founder of Ruka - a global design cooperative and founder support network - and Yorba, a reverse CRM and passport to a more ethical Internet. Today, we're going to talk about building a privacy- first company, Yorba, with privacy-by- design. Specifically, we'll discuss the use of a digital minimalist strategy for easy navigation of Yorba and data minimization. We'll discuss: decentralized identity for greater control over personal data; privacy- preserving analytics decisions; and, how Yorba is leveraging Consumer Reports' Data Rights Protocol for managing permissions to personal data. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks, Debra.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, great to have you here today. Why don't we start off by you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up founding both Ruka and Yorba?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, absolutely. It's been a wild ride. So, I started my career in design and healthcare. I went to school for Journalism at the University of Kansas. Ever since then, I've been running design firms in Chicago, Tokyo, New York. I was down in Costa Rica for two years and then Lisbon, Portugal for the last year and a half. It will be two years in August. But, yeah, it's been quite a ride.
Chris Zuenstrom:
The way that I ended up here is, definitely, I've always had that kind of entrepreneurial bend and was inside of branding and design agencies in Chicago and UX/ UI agencies. I got the itch to start something on my own and we started a political data company around community data. Basically, data-driven democracy is what we were trying to do - trying to get better insights into communities in an ethical way. And then, that company flamed out and went deep into debt and that created Ruka, which was started as a founder support network for myself and my co-founder of that, and our own pursuits. The model for Ruka really worked and it really attracted a lot of the entrepreneurial, creative talent and what we call 'Agency Ex-Pats' and Ex- Founders, Current Founders, all that type of stuff. So, we started Ruka 7 years ago and we've worked with lots of huge brands, lots of small startups you've never heard of. But, it's a flat organization ran on agile design principles for marketing, branding, UX/UI, product development - everything under the sun.
Chris Zuenstrom:
And through that, we have a couple different, I guess, kind of 'Pillars of Ruka'. We have our services, which works with the large entities: the Morning Stars, Barnes and Noble, Forbes. Lots of name brands: ZocDoc, Zola, things like that. And then, we've got our Foundation, which gives back to things that are cooperative upvotes every year. We've got our Ventures, which invests in external products to Ruka, but usually with the mandate that it's a founder working on a personal problem and it has the potential to have a positive impact on society. And then, the last one is our products, which is what we're talking about today got birthed out of, which is Yorba, and that's our own way to leverage the collective mind share that we built up at Ruka, which is 75 to almost 100 people strong across the world, to basically build our own products and create our system to get products and companies up and running.
Chris Zuenstrom:
So, we like to say it's hard to define what we do at Ruka, but the simple version of it is that we create products, companies, and brands of all different sizes, and we've been doing that. What better use case than to do that for yourself with Yorba? It's been a wild ride. Yorba is about two years old, and full development started as a research project about three years ago during Covid. And yeah, that's where we're at.
Debra J Farber:
That is really awesome. I just love that there's a whole systemic thought process. Yorba came out of your minimalist design, Ruka. It was an output of your - I want to say ideology - but, what you've assessed to be good design. So, let's talk a little bit about that. What is Yorba? Who's it for? Tell us some of the main product features, especially around privacy.
Chris Zuenstrom:
We started Yorba, like I said about two, three years ago, with with a focus on basically applying [inaudible] designers. So, I think one of the things that is interesting is that we have more of a design approach towards privacy, probably, than a lot of your past people that have come onto the podcast or like even your audience. But, we applied design basically to the internet as a whole, which I know sounds corny; and to look at where could we focus to make people's lives better from a societal aspect? Where we came out of that was Yorba, and we're not even to really the start of what the product vision is for Yorba. But, Yorba right now, that's the way that we constructed it as a go-to-market tool to make it easier for citizens and people to declutter and get rid of all the baggage that they've accrued over the last two decades of essentially just using the internet. Wandering around the internet, you're going to pick up a lot of 'barnacles at sea' - whatever analogy you want to use. We started Yorba to basically give people a tool to get people off of all the lists that they've accrued over the years, over the decades, with their email inboxes as a primary identifier for identity that we use today. But, yeah, it's a way to basically simplify your online existence. So, if you have 500 accounts, we give you ways to get down to having 100 accounts; and right now it's pretty manual when it comes to like logins and things like that. But, some of our biggest features that people love we just launched it - it's also in good context; we launched at the start of January. We were picked up in TechCrunch as a digital platform like Mint for decluttering your online life, and that drove a lot of new members and users and premium members to Yorba. Since Yorba is a self-funded through Ruka Public Benefit Corporation, which we intentionally incorporated as a PBC at the beginning to keep the intent of what we're trying to build clean, even at scale when more investors and stuff might want to get involved. But yeah, so on the feature front, right now you can log into Yorba.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yorba is a platform that manages relationships. We think of everything as a relationship that you have online, not like in the dating app sense or anything like that, but the relationships that people have with platforms. Right? So, the platforms they use; the platforms they don't use; the platforms they've never used, but somehow end up on those lists; and, we're trying to give people the insight to get off of those lists. One of the things that we've seen working with lots of startups and working with lots of stuff on the Ruka side is all of the highly sophisticated CRM tools, mailing list tools, all these things that the businesses have to manage. Any small business has to manage all of their member lists or their prospects and stuff like that, but there's not really a CRM version of that for the citizen side, for the consumer side, and that's why we really focused on Yorba as being that reverse CRM, which makes sense to some people. It's confusing to some if you're not in that space, but yeah, we think of it as a way for you to aggregate all the data that people have on you and slowly get rid of it. If you weigh 500 pounds, you want to get down to 300 pounds, right, a way to start shedding all of that weight.
Chris Zuenstrom:
The key features are unsubscribing from emails. So, right now we connect to Gmail. We put it all in a clean little CRM system that you can just manually write from Yorba and unsubscribe from all the mailing lists that, I guess, the digital minimalism aspects - don't bring you joy, that you don't need that, don't have any utility, that are just noise and clogging up your stuff. We also have a way, through that same inbox connection, to find all the past accounts and logins, using natural language processing and machine learning to basically identify those and pull those out for you.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Then we created a database of the top 10,000 linked sites online so that we have instructions on how to delete those with a lot of direct account links. So, if we find 300 accounts that you might have online, chances are there's going to be a lot of instructions on how to delete those. You can definitely easily unsubscribe from everything in Yorba and then we're working on ways to make that a not- as- manual process. On the deletion front, we also, through Plaid, connect into your bank account and we run a script on that to find all of your paid subscriptions so you can see what you're paying for.
Chris Zuenstrom:
And then, yeah, I guess, on the privacy functions, we've partnered with a platform called TUSDR (Terms of Service Didn't Read). They basically created right now a manual way to. . .basically a system to grade all these privacy policies based on what data they get, how hard it is to get rid of the account, stuff like that and they give them a grade and we associate those grades to any relationship and account that we found; and, all of that is helping you manage your overall digital footprint. And, we also do the basic monitoring the dark web and the open web for any data breaches, which a lot of password managers do, but it is something people actually really love. On Yorba's, it's just a one-stop shop to see all the relationships that are associated to your identity online right now.
Debra J Farber:
That's pretty awesome. What inspired you to focus on consumer privacy issues with Yorba? So many of the privacy tech and privacy-first companies that come to market often focus on B2B. So, yeah, let us know what really inspired you here.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, there's more people in the world than businesses. So we wanted to really do something that impacted people's lives and I think it's, honestly, it's probably easier to focus on the business side. It's easier to make revenue. It's easier to find investors. It's easier to sell your company, but that's not our intent with Yorba. So, we wanted to take the hard route, and we've also taken the hard route on privacy stuff with Yorba. Thing s that would be a lot easier, if we just installed the easy platforms that put you into basically the well of data with everybody else or track things and optimize the different funnels, like all those things. Those make it a lot easier to start a company for privacy issues.
Chris Zuenstrom:
But for us, Yorba, we wanted to stay clean. We wanted to be this public benefit corporation that we set it out to be. So we wanted to have a positive impact on society and I believe, even for the first two months that we've been really live, we've seen a lot of people really love what we're doing. I think one of the most exciting things for me over the last two months is something I've worked on for two years is we are a small team of 10 people. So, when we got this wave of Techcrunch traffic and stuff, like I am the person that is manning the intercom chatbots. Right? I'm answering the questions, but we've got so much love through those on what we're doing and people think it's amazing what we're trying to do and we want to.
Chris Zuenstrom:
that's a lot more fun for our team to focus on the consumer side of stuff, just because there's enough tools out there that help you automate and do all these other things on the B2B side. For us, on the privacy aspect for consumers, a lot of it takes - from a design perspective and then like a methodology and a mindset perspective - a lot of our privacy is privacy- by- reduction and doing things the right way with lean data practices. But also, if you have fewer nodes to attack from a privacy standpoint, you are safer. Right? You are healthier online, if you want to use that analogy. So, we want to help people get healthier online so that they can make more informed decisions in the future, which will also be a part of the platform that we're trying to build here.
Debra J Farber:
I love it and I think it's absolutely a noble cause. We definitely need more attention on consumer privacy products and, as you explained, they're just a little harder to bring to market for various reasons. I know you set this up as a public benefit corporation or a B Corp. Can you share with our listeners, who may not be familiar with that concept, that what are the benefits to designating the organization as a B Corp and just what is it even involved to become a B Corp?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, so there's an organization out there called B Corp that can license the branding and marketing of, like you are B Corp and if you see that little B logo around, that's actually an organization that keeps people to a certain high standards. It can be around sustainability, it can be around privacy, it can be around a lot of different topics; but, essentially it all comes down to that you have a triple bottom line to your business. So, it's not just profit over people at all times. There's some of the qualifier that you have written in, essentially to track as a company. Then, for Yorba's instance, we actually incorporated as a B Corp, which in the legal concepts that's called a public benefit corporation. So, we're enshrined from the get go to basically have that triple bottom line and to make sure that we're doing good for society. Now we're tracking all the good stuff, all the DEI, everything that people try to.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Honestly, I would say, like lots of larger corporations or even later- stage startups, try to badge themselves as this. Very few companies, I would argue, do what Yorba's doing, which is incorporate themselves as that. Because to your question around what are the benefits of that? There aren't a lot. So, there's more scrutiny to do it the right way from your internal team that joins you at the early stage company and if you do find scale and stuff like that, you do have more reporting to do. At the beginning they don't really care until you find some traction and stuff, but it does put you more in a legally enshrined thing where you have to report out on that stuff. The classic example in the startup world for us is investors don't like B-Corps because it does not put profit first and that scares them. You can still be a very highly profitable company and there has been these ones.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Kickstarter - you can go on B-Corp's website. There's a decent number of companies you've heard of. Lemonade is a recent example of a B-Corp that went public for a lot of money - the insurance company that did things the right way and they got some funding as well. Yeah, they got a lot of funding, so it can be done. You just don't hear about it as much. The case with Kickstarter - which I love personally and I think founders love it, but I would say investors don't love it - is the Founder of Kickstarter was not a B-Corp at the beginning and basically went through the process of becoming a B-Corp to essentially limit the outside investor noise on his board. In our founder world, he's a little hero and our kind of socially- conscious driven tech startup space. You can go look it up. There's definitely articles about investors not liking that right. But he changed midstream right Cause he would argue that the B-Corp movement and stuff like that didn't exist when he started Kickstarter, really. So he changed it to that.
Debra J Farber:
It is fun. I love that he used the incorporation there to actually control his investors. I think that's funny.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, it makes you like Kickstarter more, right?
Debra J Farber:
It does. It's activism, but I think it's for the public's benefit, so it's definitely something I can get behind.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, and I guess if you're asking, what's the primary benefit of the B-Corp, it is a signal to the market that you are trying to do things a little bit differently. Right? Ben and Jerry's is a B-Corp. There's AllBirds, the shoes or the socks or something there. I think they are as well. There are a couple of high- profile ones, mostly on the retail side, that try to signal to the market that they're not some huge mega-corp that's going to just do whatever to squeeze a buck. So that's probably your long-term benefit of being a B-corp, that flag that you're flying.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, and I want to point out I don't think at all that any criticism of it being virtue-signaling to be a B-corp really makes any sense, because you're literally standing by, you're creating the constraints to the business, as a forcing function to actually stand by the values that you're telling the public that you have. If anything, you're not just saying something and maybe in your daily life not actually doing it. You're literally forcing into the design of everything of the company, putting the public over profits, and I think that's amazing. So, congrats on that and having successful product launch and it sounds like a lot of people are really excited about what you're building.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, it's early, but there's good signals for sure.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, we definitely have a lot more to talk about in terms of the design decisions you've made, some architectural approaches. But first, I know you talk a lot about digital minimalism. Can you unpack that a little bit about what that means to you and then how you see that increasing privacy?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, absolutely. I love the digital minimalism movement. It was coined by a professor. I think he's on the East Coast somewhere. I think in Baltimore or something - Cal Newport. So, you'll hear, if you look at the book (you can find it on Amazon), digital minimalism is definitely a movement that is starting out there. There's a lot of podcasts on it now, so there's no shortage of content on it.
Chris Zuenstrom:
But really, what digital minimalism is, it's this decluttering of kind of all of these things that either don't bring you joy or don't have a utility in your life, and to get rid of them. Right? For a lot of people, that's getting off social media. That's deleting. Go through your phone and just delete all these apps. Do you need all those apps? Just delete all of them. Turn off all the notifications on your phone so they can't keep asking you for your time and attention. I think Cal (the guy who started digital minimalism) and then my friend Ryder (who started a company called Bullet Journal, which embraces that type of mindset and journaling and kind of reflection), I've learned a lot from them. From a digital minimalism perspective, it's all about "does it have utility?" but doesn't get rid of it, basically Because it's not like naive You're not going to delete your iMessage app because you get too many text messages - you need that. You need to pick up your kids from school, so you're going to leave that on. You're not going to delete that. But, it's getting rid of all these little things on the secondary and tertiary of your digital lives so that you have more time to focus on the present and to focus on the things that really matter to you.
Chris Zuenstrom:
I think if you read into larger minimalism topics, you're usually going to find that it revolves around once again that kind of decluttering aspect. But it might be like looking at your closet and you have 20 shirts and you don't want to just throw this away. Maybe you put five in a box for a month and if you still don't need them in that month, you get rid of them. So, Ryder says it best from Bullet Journal - there's a physical weight to traditional minimalism, and with digital minimalism, there's more of a cognitive weight.
Chris Zuenstrom:
It's a harder concept for people to understand at the beginning, but there's been a lot more people since Covid that have really turned onto that, just because they feel overloaded with the digital marketing and all the people that - going back to Yorba - want to be in a relationship with them.
Chris Zuenstrom:
They want your time; they want your attention. So, for Yorba, where we fit in that space is -any of these podcasts or these how- to- start- as- a- digital- minimalist - most of them are going to start with your inbox, because that's where you're going to find the most noise in the digital world. Then, they're going to go to what you pay for and what you buy online, what your subscription are. For Yorba, we have a whole page on digital minimalism, because we have a lot of members on Yorba that have come through that mindset and that digital wellness, digital minimalism mindset on Yorba. If you come in there and you've got 450 mailing lists that you subscribe to, you could get rid of half of those in like under an hour by just unsubscribing in mass from the tool, and so Yorba helps people really kickstart, almost like a boot camp for digital minimalism. You can get going quickly towards that intent of being leaner online and having more time to focus on the things that matter to you.
Debra J Farber:
That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that explanation. I know that you've been working with Consumer Reports on their Data Rights Protocol and their app Permission Slip. Tell us a little bit about that. What are you leveraging Permission Slip for? What is Permission Slip?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, Consumer Reports has this amazing Innovation Lab. Permission Slip is an app that they created. They do a lot of different things that are amazing and the kind of consumer watch practices is what you call them - like anything to make consumers' lives better, to basically bring a lens to somebody's watching over the best interests of consumers. So, we love Consumer Reports and they created this Permission Slip app, which kind of turned us on to what they've been doing. What Permission Slip is like an authorized agent for you to submit data deletion requests through that platform. Right now, they do that mainly in California through CCPA and Yorba joined . . . They have a coalition of a couple of different companies, which is this Data Rights Protocol Coalition you would call it. What they're trying to do, and what Consumer Reports is organizing, because you do need like a brand and organization like them to make something like this possible, because all these startups working together, the scale won't be there. Right?
Chris Zuenstrom:
So, they've organized this group and there's two on the privacy side which are like platforms that work with businesses. They're platforms like One Trust or Mine OS that work with specific companies to manage deletion requests of data. Because by law, if you get an email that says delete my data in specific areas anywhere in Europe which is one of the reasons that all of our teams are slowly moving here but anywhere in Europe and California and there's lots of other states coming online with these type of laws the company has 30 days to delete all of your data. So on the company side that can be actually quite difficult sometimes if you don't even know where is all of Debra's data. Do we have her email? Do we have her bank account? Do we have social security number? Sometimes they don't even know; it's in different systems and stuff.
Chris Zuenstrom:
So, there's businesses that have started on that side, mainly One Trust and a company called Transcend, and those are two partners - not partners, but those are two participants in the Data Rights Protocol Ecosystem on the B2B side, and then Permission Slip and Yorba.
Chris Zuenstrom:
So, Permission Slip is the homegrown app to test out this process that Consumer Reports built, and then Yorba is obviously what we're building. We are, in this ecosystem, called 'Authorized Agents'. So basically, on Yorba, hopefully by the end of Q2 (in about three months, maybe four months), all the things right now that you have to go manually delete for logins and accounts you have, you would be able to, if we have them linked through these data players on the B2B side, you can just delete them automatically. It creates a ticket, sends them through the protocol and Consumer Reports has basically standardized the process to delete your data from all these companies. So it's pretty amazing what they're doing and Yorba is super excited to be a part of that. Everyone we've met from Consumer Reports has been fantastic in helping with our journey as a small company, because they totally could have blown us off, to be honest with you. But, they've worked with us for over a year helping develop this protocol.
Debra J Farber:
That's pretty awesome. Thank you so much for highlighting their good work and how you're working with them. I think that's helpful for this audience of privacy engineers. Hopefully we can have more people get involved in the ecosystem.
Chris Zuenstrom:
That'd be great, because I think right now there's just going to be four people the two on each side basically trying to launch it in Q2 or summer 2024. Obviously, the more the merrier. The more B2B businesses come online, the more companies will be a part of the network. So we're excited about where it's going to go.
Debra J Farber:
Awesome. Let's talk about architecture for a minute. Yorba is building a personal CRM system. What architectural design decisions did you make that affect privacy here?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, absolutely. We've definitely taken some of the harder routes over time, but also some of it's just we want to. Our CTO, David Shafoudi, used to say that we have 'privacy by scarcity,' right? Nobody knows. So, we exist for a while, so it gave us time to build up a lot of these things.
Chris Zuenstrom:
We focus on Mozilla's lean data practices, but we really focus on collecting. We don't collect a lot of data, we don't store data, we just process it and then we put basically the identifiers into the CRM system so that you can access it again. So, we might process somebody's inbox, which we'll read through the messages, but it's looking for keywords, basically, and our models are just pulled that out so that we can create records for you relationship records. In Yorba, we try to use a lot of the encryption. Everything's through secure access protocols, and I think a lot of the stuff we try to do is in line almost with kind of what we've met with in the past, like DuckDuckGo. Duckduckgo tries to collect no data. Right? So, privacy through - they just literally connect no data. Yorba has to collect some data, but we try to keep it as a very minimal layer so that you can access actions that you want to take on those specific relationships and then we don't store any of that. Then, in the future, when we might have even more data on here, Yorba's intent is to not store any data at all and that we want to have.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Basically, people have to bring- your- own- storage type of solution. If you trust Google Drive, if you trust Proton Drive (which we've talked to them); we've also got Web3 options that will be coming online, which I think we'll talk about. But, our goal is just to be able to encrypt that data, only access it when we need to, but it's actually stored on your local devices. So, those are some of the decisions that we make along the way. We also on the analytics thing. On the analytics front, we use Matomo, which is a fantastic platform that allows us to anonymize all user information. So, we don't have anyone's user information in Matomo. So, we can see analytics that help us improve the platform, but we can't see that Debra came in here and was thinking about deleting Netflix. We can only see high-level goals and actions that we've set up through there and it's the identifier that is associated with our members. I think it's like a string of 20 letters and numbers. Right, we would never know who you are.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, for Matomo - they've been around a long time. I definitely want to highlight them to this audience because they're competitors of Google Analytics, but they do the analytics in a privacy-preserving way. So, speak to us a little bit about what is the quality of the product like compared to Google. So many people will be like probably thinking, if you switch to something else, you're going to have an inferior product. I know that's not the case with Matomo, that there's actually really great analytics. So, what's your experience been in terms of the quality of the analytics while still preserving privacy?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, I would argue that it's actually way more flexible than Google Analytics, because Google Analytics is a tool that has to serve the mass market. Right? It needs to be super easy to understand and packaged for a much broader audience, whereas with Matomo, maybe there's a little bit more of a learning curve at the beginning. From Matomo, but the analytics that it can provide you and the goals and the segments and all that, you get way more granular data that you would want on how people actually use your product, where they come from and stuff. You can cut it up in all these different ways. With Google Analytics, I think it's fine for what it is for sure, which I think is better for websites than it would be for products, but they've definitely tried to create products type of analytics tools recently. But for us, Matomo does everything we needed to do and more. We've reached out to them before for support desk tickets and they've been fantastic. We've also used Fathom in the past on our website. Right now, our website's
Chris Zuenstrom:
a mix of things, to be honest. Yeah, and the other thing that we like with Matomo, which we haven't done it yet because it's had them prioritized in our backlog, but you can host it on your own servers. Right? So, whereas Google Analytics you consent to help in make Google smarter across all these things, by using Google Analytics, with Matomo you can keep it on your own private instance so that data doesn't actually ever leave your servers. For a European-based company with GDPR and stuff, that's highly important that we're not taking users' data - even if it's anonymized, being grouped in and repackaged and resold for the greater data platforms that are Google. So, basically, our members can sleep well that night knowing that it's just for us to basically improve the platform for them. It's for nobody else and nobody else sees it. That's why we like with Matomo.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. I wasn't even trying to just get you to talk about how awesome a particular product is, like a particular company's product with Matomo. It's more that Google's the status quo. Most people, they set up a new website or product, that's literally it's just no brainer to them. That's what everyone uses, it's status quo, so that's what they go use. But, I want people here in this conversation to understand that no, you have a choice and if you're doing privacy by design and you have design decisions to make, something like Matomo or Fathom is out there. It's been around for, I feel, like over a decade. This isn't a new product. I think it comes from Europe, so maybe it's lesser known here in the U. S. I've only heard positive things about it. It's gotten better over time.
Chris Zuenstrom:
When we talked to their support guy, he was based out of Paris. I don't know if the whole company was based out of Paris, but he was from France. I don't know if it's headquartered out of France, or I think it's a remote- first thing, because there was somebody else from the U. S. that we talked to at one point, as well. But, it's come a long way over the last year or two that we've been using it. The interface has gotten a lot better, but it's a very powerful tool. We don't want to highlight just one product or tool, but I guess, going back to your earlier question about why be a PBC; what's the benefit of that? It's, I guess, what we're highlighting right now with Matomo, although I don't even know if they're. . . I think they're a nonprofit. I don't know. I'm actually not sure how they're structured. But, because they are doing things the right way, and even if it's a little less convenient at the beginning, you can tell that companies like ours, that makes a difference.
Debra J Farber:
Absolutely. Thank you for that. So, we're still talking about architecture here and I'm really excited to bring up the concept of decentralized identity, because I think a lot of your long term plan with Yorba really centers around decentralized identity, decentralized storage; and, as you mentioned before, email address has been used as a primary key identifier for individuals for so long across organizations. You're flipping a script here with decentralized identity by giving people the power to use their identifier to find stuff across their inbox, their relationships and with platforms, as you said.
Debra J Farber:
Tell us a little bit about the benefits of using decentralized identity, which is also referred to as self-sovereign identity. You're never going to hear someone like Google talk about self-sovereign identity, like it's a little more disruptive to general business, of the idea of getting everyone to be self-sovereign, but you will hear like a large company like Google talk about decentralized identity. It's specifically like where all the logins, all the social logins that we use, whether it login with Facebook, login with Google that's a decentralized identity architectural design choice. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about the benefits of using decentralized identity and then how you're often thinking about even moving into self-sovereign identity and what that means.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, it's definitely. . . you could argue that the initial research paper, deck, presentation, whatever you want to call it that started Yorba was mainly around this topic. Everything we built around the CRM and stuff was to galvanize people around the problem of the bloated Internet. So, where we want to go is more on the self-sovereign identity. We think it's crazy that the platforms have all owned this login with Facebook, login with Google, and just how long email has persisted as the primary identifier of identity online, which is crazy, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. So, we're not naive to that.
Chris Zuenstrom:
We're trying to take web 2 patterns and put web3 infrastructure beneath them at Yorba, where we want to go, because self-sovereign identity and decentralized identity has a lot of benefits. The main ones, really, which is why you'll never hear the big companies really embrace them are it gives individuals control over their personal information. It also allows you to only share what's necessary and enhances the privacy and security when you do that. So, if I have control of it, if I only have to share what I want to share with the platform. So, going back to how Yorba helps broker relationships between people and platforms, right now we're all about reducing all the bloat. The future will be about brokering the better things. So if a consumer wants to be in a relationship with Netflix, you know what you're sharing with them. You're sharing this block of information, but you're in that in a transparent way.
Chris Zuenstrom:
I think that the way that decentralized storage works obviously is from a privacy audience, which they can educate me more on.
Chris Zuenstrom:
I can educate them on it, but for sure, if you want to attack or try to. . .when you're putting all this type of stuff in one area, it's super scary. That is the same case with Yorba. So the goal that we have with Yorba is to be able to load something that looks like a personal profile that you can use is identify an agent to connect to different platforms around the Internet; but, at the same time, that information that's stored for that is actually decentralized into all of these pods around the internet. So, it would be very hard for you to ever break into that. There is no central source. There is no "We just broken in, stole all these passwords or all these people's social security numbers, because everything would be broken down into these federated storage pods around the world. So that word is organizing essentially into a easy to digest interface. Then when you log out it's gone again right Back into its nodes, so you can ever really hack Yorba is the goal.
Debra J Farber:
That's pretty exciting.
Debra J Farber:
If you have centralized storage somewhere, then the criminal hackers are going to go where the money is, which is where you don't try to hack into that large storage, whether it's an S3 bucket or some other storage and so that's going to want to make sure those things are all configured appropriately.
Debra J Farber:
There's all these challenges with doing that. So, yeah, it definitely seems to make things safer by decentralizing storage. Then, with decentralized identity or something like using a social login, it's helpful that you don't have to remember all these other identities when you're logging in. But, if you're using something like login with social media companies, they're able to continue to track what you're doing on these third party sites because they know you logged in now to this site. Right? So, you're basically, if you're using the social media decentralized identity logins, then you're adding to the surveillance machine, almost. But, if you're using something that's maybe branded more self-sovereign identity, it's still decentralized identity, but something like what you're doing is you're not tracking across websites as people are logging in. So, you connect that decentralized identity with decentralized storage and you're just you're making a person's personal infrastructure more secure, safer and less likely of a target for hackers.
Chris Zuenstrom:
For sure, and I think that's what we're hoping that the secret sauce could this kind of next phase of the Internet around how people manage relationships is basically essentially a CRM system meets private profiles. So, some of the things built on kind of Web3 and kind of future tech type of privacy and security systems and pods beneath it. What looks like it and I like my co-founder of Ruka and my co-founder of Yorba is a very talented designer named Nolan Cabeje. He designs these things and it looks super simple, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes. That's what we're trying to do is we're trying to bring a minimalist type of platform that has a lot of power underneath it and essentially connecting CRMs and profiles in a private PBC benefit corporation way and hoping that galvanizes a big enough community that we can make real change without these things are done online.
Debra J Farber:
I'm really impressed with the mission and the simplicity and ease of use. Keep it up. What's next for Yorba? What's on your roadmap, or how do you see the next year shaping up?
Chris Zuenstrom:
The next year. We've definitely got buckets that we want to get into. We obviously, with the wave of people that came from the TechCrunch article, right now we are just reaching out, talking to premium members on the platform and users on the platform to see what we can do better. We're working on better scanning. So, our models - basically being able to do better scanning, better processing, faster processing and then be able to really focus in on. Right now, we're all about aggregating this data and organizing it for you and once we're good enough at that
Chris Zuenstrom:
our next bridge will be into getting the direct actions that you can do for Yorba better, so all the data rights protocol stuff that we talked about earlier. So, getting those better, getting our unsubscribes better, our cancel subscriptions better. Then, once those are good, those one-to-one actions, really working a lot on automations and scripts basically and what we call like the YoBot. Essentially, you could say I just want to remove anything that I don't read this much or something I haven't logged into in this set duration, and we just run scripts through your data and basically start removing and pruning and cleaning things up for you. So, a little bookkeeper, housekeeper type of automated bot that will start doing that on your behalf. So, make the process a little less manual; but first, we have to keep cleaning and getting better at the scan so we can do that.
Debra J Farber:
That would be really helpful to me personally, because I've had my email address since gMail was still in beta, you know, when it first came out, and I have a lot of junk that keeps getting sent to me and I need to unsubscribe and I don't know 30,000 unread emails over the course of 15, 20 years. I could definitely use some help with cleaning up my inbox.
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, it's crazy and like the dark patterns that companies use these days. We were in private data last year and we have people being like "I unsubscribe from this but I keep getting it, and so now I started grouping those so that it's easier for people to understand. But if you think you unsubscribe from, like, a Betterment email on Tuesday, you might have just unsubscribed from Betterment Tuesday notification email. You might still be on 20 different things. So that's how companies these days they have to, because of the CANSPAM act, they have to allow you to unsubscribe from emails and we hope eventually there'll be something like the spam act on deleting your accounts, which I know there's people working on at the political level.
Chris Zuenstrom:
But, if you think about the way that companies do all this, it's crazy and we've learned a lot over the last two years because, like, they just really make it hard for you to break up with them, as we all know. When you actually see that in Yorba's CRM and you're like, "oh, wow, I get 14 emails from LinkedIn. So when I thought I was subscribed from that one thing, I was just unscribing from the Tuesday 10am coffee email, I still get 19 more. So, you do have to unsubscribe one- by- one from all of those currently, unless you just turn them all off. It's crazy, but we're trying to create real tools for people to fight back.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's empowering people. What's the best way that listeners can learn more about Yorba or can reach out to you and maybe collaborate or get a demo?
Chris Zuenstrom:
Yeah, absolutely. Yorba's in open public beta. It's free to sign up, free to scan, see all the stuff that you've accrued. Yeah, just go to Yorba. co and you'll see all the fun stuff that we're doing on there. And, yeah, sign up. Join our community. We'd love to have you.
Debra J Farber:
Thank you so much. Do you have anything else you want to leave the audience with before we close today?
Chris Zuenstrom:
No, I think we've covered everything and yeah, I think it's going to be a fun ride, so join us.
Debra J Farber:
Excellent, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us today on The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast. Awesome. Until next Tuesday, everyone, when we'll be back with engaging content and another great guest or guests. Thanks for joining us this week on Shifting Privacy Left. Make sure to visit our website, ShiftingPrivacyLeft. com, where you can subscribe to updates so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, if you found this episode valuable, go ahead and share it with a friend, and if you're an engineer who cares passionately about privacy, check out Privado: the developer-friendly privacy platform and sponsor of this show. To learn more, go to provado. ai. Be sure to tune in next Tuesday for a new episode. Bye for now.
Chris describes his vision of the next phase of the Internet where people will be able to manage relationships with companies and platforms, essentially via a combined of a 'Personal CRM System' & 'Private Profiles'
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