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Ask HN: Would you pay for a service that actively protects privacy?

8 points by xfour ↗ HN
Trying to get a sense of the perceived market outside my circle whether this is something worth putting in the hours necessary to reach an MVP.

I'm envisioning a suite of services including burner & legal options, for example

  Throwaway & forwarded email addresses
  Masked phone numbers
  
  Automated Opt-outs requests 
  Delete my information requests
And for checking companies compliance, creating a graph of the information that can be used to find pathways of where consumer information is being shared / sold.

Price would likely be enough to cover some of the incidentals above in the 2-5$ USD range.

6 comments

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nradov
I would consider paying, but there are already numerous services offering burner email addresses and phone numbers. Some are even free. What's your unique value proposition?

And how will you prevent spammers from abusing your service?

xfour
There are lots of services doing pieces of the puzzle, but the issue is larger than just the burner setup.

A one stop shop if you will that does all the above as far as I know does not exist.

The unique value proposition in a nutshell is the be able to regain privacy by tracking and disrupting the flow of information between the data brokers.

yuppie_scum
I feel like handing your privacy to a single source is a big risk in itself. What about when the “privacy co” gets breached?
xfour
Definitely something to consider, but as envisioned this company would actually greatly reduce the attack surface for this information, by eliminating it from a huge amount of third party companies with unknown security practices.

As to your direct question. there are obviously the “best practices” around security and risk tolerance. There are some times a users personal information might be necessary, but likely there’s a lot where it wouldn’t.

One could for example anonymize is the primary data graph away from the user. The key piece of information is directed data flow not the information.

Another question is whether or not that is an acceptable risk given the alternatives. For a single consumer to realistically opt-out and keep track of all the companies benefitting from their data, it’s an impossible task.

That consumer would be safer since the target vector is only themselves, but if you want to make a dent against this industry you’d have to do it at scale.

dhaavi
We‘re way down this road, albeit with a different set of services, which you can find at safing.io

The biggest challenge we continue to face is how to make the value of privacy visible, as the privacy protection itself cannot be really seen by users.

A good example is brave with their „big numbers going up“ of blocked ads and saved bandwidth on the New Tab page.

If you can figure out how you can protect users _and_ make them feel that protection, they will pay for your service.

If things go forward with your idea, it would be nice to have a chat, if you’re up for it.