Spend enough time online, and you’ll accumulate a digital paper trail of data breaches, accounts, logins, subscriptions, mailing lists, and passwords. With its multi-purpose online decluttering tool, Yorba, a new firm, can help you manage your growing digital footprint. You can organize, monitor, and manage your online accounts, unsubscribe from mailing lists, cancel subscriptions, examine privacy regulations, and more from its web-based dashboard.
It’s like a mint for your online existence.
Yorba, like Mint, doesn’t save your data. Instead, it connects to your Gmail and, eventually, other web services and cloud storage providers. Yorba uses natural language processing and machine learning to find your digital “relationships”—your accounts, services, and mailing lists—by scanning your email. Connect to financial institutions using Plaid integration and import CSV accounts.
From your Yorba dashboard, you can view stats about your account interactions and decide what to do, such as resetting a password found in a data breach, canceling accounts due to a weak privacy policy, unsubscribing from a spam mailing list, and more.
Co-founder and CEO Chris Zeunstrom says, “Our goal right now is to aggregate all these things and give insights, and then be able to slowly build in tools that have direct action from Yorba.”
Zeunstrom claims he was motivated to work on the project after being overwhelmed with emails from various accounts.
“These emails are all basically vulnerability points that could be breached,” he says. Zeunstrom tried utilizing a password manager to handle his accounts, but it didn’t work.
“Password managers are good at aggregating bloat, but they don’t help you reduce it,” he says. Something resembling a Fitbit for digital connections is needed. Zeunstrom says Yorba is a relationship manager seeking to improve interactions between individuals and platforms.
Yorba’s features may seem familiar.
Existing programs like Unroll allow mailing list removal. Gmail’s built-in unsubscribe feature, or me. Rocket Money (previously Truebill) manages and cancels subscriptions. Putting all these things and more under one roof makes Yorba unique.
Besides mailing list and subscription management, Yorba can warn you about accounts associated with data breaches, offer password managers, help you find old accounts you no longer use, and view stats like how often an account emails you and how often you open those emails.
It may score a company’s privacy policy based on its invasiveness or unethicalness. This is in conjunction with the Amsterdam-based NGO “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read.” The business is using machine learning to read and score privacy regulations, which humans then review.
Yorba began as a research project three years ago before forming as a public benefit organization and launching its private beta last year.
Easy usage makes Yorba interesting beyond its utility. Since Zeunstrom’s design business, Ruca, financed the project, the team comprises UI/UX experts. Not venture capital, but Ruca’s “give-back model” is what pays for Yorba. That means when Ruca signs a contract with a customer, some of the income goes into a fund for other enterprises.
Zeunstrom runs Ruca in New York as Chairman and CEO, and Yorba from Lisbon.
Yorba has co-founder and CTO David Schmudde and CDO Nolan Cabeje. Zeunstrom tried to recruit Schmudde for Advocate.io, a political digital business. Schmudde refused the position but joined Yorba years later because he liked data privacy. Cabeje, a co-founder from Ruca, is active.
The firm will add services and features in the coming months. Dropbox, Google Drive, Proton Drive, and others are being considered for integration. Yorba also partners with Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, so anybody may contribute their own data to it in time, but solely as an organizing layer.
A Data Rights Protocol functionality to standardize customer data rights demands like account deletions will appear later this spring on Yorba. This new function will be comparable to Just delete Me, which helps people deactivate accounts at 1,500 sites and services. Yorba will immediately delete accounts for 10,000 sites.
Later, the business plans to add capabilities to update your postal address with companies when you move and your credit card information when you obtain a new card.
Since entering public beta last month, Yorba has had over 1,000 members, 160 of whom are paying customers. The $6 per month, payable yearly premium package includes active data breach monitoring, subscription management, and limitless online account administration activities.
Zeunstrom believes it’s priced to earn enough money to self-sustain without investors.
Simple account scanning is free with Yorba.
Yorba works like Mint to declutter your digital life.
