The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses.
I hope it does! I'm banking on it too for my project.
We built Ethi because the only way to find out how companies like Facebook track you, what they know about you and how they use it was to trawl through their privacy policies and settings! And if you wanted to delete data from Facebook, it's almost impossible, you'd need to manually delete every action you ever took in their app!
We think that everyone should to be able to easily understand and control the data companies collect about them, and one day even use it for themselves.
We help you find out how Facebook:
- tracks you across the internet
- tracks you across the world
- collects hundreds of interests about you
- tracks your social life
- can even track your mood.
Then we help you delete what you no longer want them to keep! We're trying to put users back in control.
Our users are not the product at Ethi. We don't use your data for anything else. Instead of Ethi being totally free and us monetising by selling ads or data to a hedge fund, we ask users to pay so we can expand Ethi to Google, Amazon and others, and build a full toolset for you to decide who knows what about you.
Data is encrypted in your browser before you upload it, and is only decrypted to provide the graphs and analysis you see in Ethi.
Looking forward to hearing what you think! Sign up to try it out - if you want to subscribe you can use the code NEWHACKER when you sign up for 80% off (lets you use FaceErase our deletion tool).
My hot take on what's actually important when talking about moving away from Facebook: #DeleteFacebook isn't realistic. Facebook is designed to be hard to delete. They’ve been improving retention since 2007.
Criticising Facebook is good, BUT removing barriers to deleting it is crucial.
We need to build a Working Exit Door from Facebook.
Super interested to hear thoughts on the plan, what we've built so far, what you want to see next.
I hope it does! I'm banking on it too for my project.