S3E7: 'Personal CRM: Embracing Digital Minimalism & Privacy Empowerment' with Chris Zeunstrom (Yorba)

Episode Transcript
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Chris Zuenstrom (00:00):
The goal that we have with Yorba is to be able
to load something that lookslike a personal profile that you
can use as identifying an agentto connect to different
platforms around the Internet;but, at the same time, that
information that's stored forthat is actually decentralized
into all of these pods aroundthe Internet.
So, it would be very hard foryou to ever break into that.

(00:21):
There is no central source.
There is no "We just broken andstole all these passwords or
all these people's socialsecurity numbers, because
everything would be broken downinto these federated storage
pods around the world, Right?
So, we're just organizing,essentially, into an easy- to-
digest interface and then whenyou log out it's gone again,
back into its nodes.
You can never really hack Yorbaas the goal.

Debra J Farber (00:44):
Hello, I am Debra J Farber.
Welcome to The Shifting PrivacyLeft Podcast, where we talk
about embedding privacy bydesign and default into the
engineering function to preventprivacy harms to humans and to
prevent dystopia.
Each week, we'll bring youunique discussions with global
privacy technologists andinnovators working at the

(01:04):
bleeding- edge of privacyresearch and emerging
technologies, standards,business models and ecosystems.
Welcome everyone to theShifting Privacy Left podcast.
I'm your host and residentprivacy guru, Debra J Farber.
Today I'm delighted to welcomemy next guest, Chris Zuenstrom.

(01:25):
Chris is an Americanentrepreneur currently residing
in Lisbon, Portugal.
He is the owner of Crispy StromIndustries Inc.
where he focuses on solvingproblems, creating products, and
building businesses through thethoughtful application of
design and technology.
Chris is the founder of Ruka -a global design cooperative and

(01:47):
founder support network - andYorba, a reverse CRM and
passport to a more ethicalInternet.
Today, we're going to talkabout building a privacy- first
company, Yorba, with privacy-by-design.
Specifically, we'll discuss theuse of a digital minimalist

(02:08):
strategy for easy navigation ofYorba and data minimization.

We'll discuss (02:12):
decentralized identity for greater control
over personal data; privacy-preserving analytics decisions;
and, how Yorba is leveragingConsumer Reports' Data Rights
Protocol for managingpermissions to personal data.
Welcome, Chris.

Hi, nice to meet you.
Thanks, Debra.

Yeah, great to have you here today.
Why don't we start off by youtelling us a little bit about
yourself and how you ended upfounding both Ruka and Yorba?

Yeah, absolutely.
It's been a wild ride.
So, I started my career indesign and healthcare.
I went to school for Journalismat the University of Kansas.
Ever since then, I've beenrunning design firms in Chicago,
Tokyo, New York.
I was down in Costa Rica fortwo years and then Lisbon,
Portugal for the last year and ahalf.

(03:04):
It will be two years in August.
But, yeah, it's been quite aride.
The way that I ended up here is,definitely, I've always had
that kind of entrepreneurialbend and was inside of branding
and design agencies in Chicagoand UX/ UI agencies.
I got the itch to startsomething on my own and we
started a political data companyaround community data.

(03:26):
Basically, data-drivendemocracy is what we were trying
to do - trying to get betterinsights into communities in an
ethical way.
And then, that company flamedout and went deep into debt and
that created Ruka, which wasstarted as a founder support
network for myself and myco-founder of that, and our own
pursuits.
The model for Ruka reallyworked and it really attracted a
lot of the entrepreneurial,creative talent and what we call

(03:48):
'Agency Ex-Pats' and Ex-Founders, Current Founders, all
that type of stuff.
So, we started Ruka 7 years agoand we've worked with lots of
huge brands, lots of smallstartups you've never heard of.
But, it's a flat organizationran on agile design principles
for marketing, branding, UX/UI,product development - everything
under the sun.

(04:09):
And through that, we have acouple different, I guess, kind
of 'Pillars of Ruka'.
We have our services, whichworks with the large entities:
the Morning Stars, Barnes andNoble, Forbes.

Lots of name brands (04:18):
ZocDoc, Zola, things like that.
And then, we've got ourFoundation, which gives back to
things that are cooperativeupvotes every year.
We've got our Ventures, whichinvests in external products to
Ruka, but usually with themandate that it's a founder
working on a personal problemand it has the potential to have
a positive impact on society.

(04:38):
And then, the last one is ourproducts, which is what we're
talking about today got birthedout of, which is Yorba, and
that's our own way to leveragethe collective mind share that
we built up at Ruka, which is 75to almost 100 people strong
across the world, to basicallybuild our own products and
create our system to getproducts and companies up and

(05:01):
running.
So, we like to say it's hard todefine what we do at Ruka, but
the simple version of it is thatwe create products, companies,
and brands of all differentsizes, and we've been doing that
.
What better use case than to dothat 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 threeyears ago during Covid.
And yeah, that's where we're at.

That is really awesome.
I just love that there's awhole systemic thought process.
Yorba came out of yourminimalist design, Ruka.
It was an output of your - Iwant to say ideology - but, what
you've assessed to be gooddesign.
So, let's talk a little bitabout that.
What is Yorba?
Who's it for?

(05:42):
Tell us some of the mainproduct features, especially
around privacy.

We started Yorba, like I said about two,
three years ago, with with afocus on basically applying
[inaudible] designers.
So, I think one of the thingsthat is interesting is that we
have more of a design approachtowards privacy, probably, than
a lot of your past people thathave come onto the podcast or
like even your audience.
But, we applied designbasically to the internet as a
whole, which I know soundscorny; and to look at where

(06:08):
could we focus to make people'slives better from a societal
aspect?
Where we came out of that wasYorba, and we're not even to
really the start of what theproduct vision is for Yorba.
But, Yorba right now, that'sthe way that we constructed it
as a go-to-market tool to makeit easier for citizens and
people to declutter and get ridof all the baggage that they've

(06:29):
accrued over the last twodecades of essentially just
using the internet.
Wandering around the internet,you're going to pick up a lot of
'barnacles at sea' - whateveranalogy you want to use.
We started Yorba to basicallygive people a tool to get people
off of all the lists thatthey've accrued over the years,
over the decades, with theiremail inboxes as a primary
identifier for identity that weuse today.

(06:51):
But, yeah, it's a way tobasically simplify your online
existence.
So, if you have 500 accounts,we give you ways to get down to
having 100 accounts; and rightnow it's pretty manual when it
comes to like logins and thingslike that.
But, some of our biggestfeatures that people love we
just launched it - it's also ingood context; we launched at the
start of January.
We were picked up in TechCrunchas a digital platform like Mint

(07:14):
for decluttering your onlinelife, and that drove a lot of
new members and users andpremium members to Yorba.
Since Yorba is a self-fundedthrough Ruka Public Benefit
Corporation, which weintentionally incorporated as a
PBC at the beginning to keep theintent of what we're trying to
build clean, even at scale whenmore investors and stuff might

(07:35):
want to get involved.
But yeah, so on the featurefront, right now you can log
into Yorba.
Yorba is a platform that managesrelationships.
We think of everything as arelationship that you have
online, not like in the datingapp sense or anything like that,
but the relationships thatpeople have with platforms.
Right?
So, the platforms they use; theplatforms they don't use; the
platforms they've never used,but somehow end up on those

(07:57):
lists; and, we're trying to givepeople the insight to get off
of those lists.
One of the things that we'veseen working with lots of
startups and working with lotsof stuff on the Ruka side is all
of the highly sophisticated CRMtools, mailing list tools, all
these things that the businesseshave to manage.
Any small business has tomanage all of their member lists

(08:18):
or their prospects and stufflike that, but there's not
really a CRM version of that forthe citizen side, for the
consumer side, and that's why wereally focused on Yorba as
being that reverse CRM, whichmakes sense to some people.
It's confusing to some ifyou're not in that space, but
yeah, we think of it as a wayfor you to aggregate all the
data that people have on you andslowly get rid of it.

(08:39):
If you weigh 500 pounds, youwant to get down to 300 pounds,
right, a way to start sheddingall of that weight.
The key features areunsubscribing from emails.
So, right now we connect toGmail.
We put it all in a clean littleCRM system that you can just
manually write from Yorba andunsubscribe from all the mailing
lists that, I guess, thedigital minimalism aspects -
don't bring you joy, that youdon't need that, don't have any

(09:02):
utility, that are just noise andclogging up your stuff.
We also have a way, throughthat same inbox connection, to
find all the past accounts andlogins, using natural language
processing and machine learningto basically identify those and
pull those out for you.
Then we created a database ofthe top 10,000 linked sites
online so that we haveinstructions on how to delete

(09:24):
those with a lot of directaccount links.
So, if we find 300 accountsthat you might have online,
chances are there's going to bea lot of instructions on how to
delete those.
You can definitely easilyunsubscribe from everything in
Yorba and then we're working onways to make that a not- as-
manual process.
On the deletion front, we also,through Plaid, connect into

(09:45):
your bank account and we run ascript on that to find all of
your paid subscriptions so youcan see what you're paying for.
And then, yeah, I guess, on theprivacy functions, we've
partnered with a platform calledTUSDR (Terms of Service Didn't
Read).
They basically created rightnow a manual way to.
.
.basically a system to gradeall these privacy policies based
on what data they get, how hardit is to get rid of the account

(10:08):
, stuff like that and they givethem a grade and we associate
those grades to any relationshipand account that we found; and,
all of that is helping youmanage your overall digital
footprint.
And, we also do the basicmonitoring the dark web and the
open web for any data breaches,which a lot of password managers
do, but it is something peopleactually really love.
On Yorba's, it's just aone-stop shop to see all the

(10:29):
relationships that areassociated to your identity
online right now.

That's pretty awesome.
What inspired you to focus onconsumer privacy issues with
Yorba?
So many of the privacy tech andprivacy-first companies that
come to market often focus onB2B.
So, yeah, let us know whatreally inspired you here.

Yeah, there's more people in the world than
businesses.
So we wanted to really dosomething 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 yourcompany, but that's not our
intent with Yorba.
So, we wanted to take the hardroute, and we've also taken the
hard route on privacy stuff withYorba.

(11:12):
Thing s that would be a loteasier, if we just installed the
easy platforms that put youinto basically the well of data
with everybody else or trackthings and optimize the
different funnels, like allthose things.
Those make it a lot easier tostart a company for privacy
issues.
But for us, Yorba, we wanted tostay clean.
We wanted to be this publicbenefit corporation that we set

(11:34):
it out to be.
So we wanted to have a positiveimpact on society and I believe
, even for the first two monthsthat we've been really live,
we've seen a lot of peoplereally love what we're doing.
I think one of the mostexciting things for me over the
last two months is somethingI've worked on for two years is
we are a small team of 10 people.
So, when we got this wave ofTechcrunch traffic and stuff,

(11:55):
like I am the person that ismanning the intercom chatbots.
Right?
I'm answering the questions,but we've got so much love
through those on what we'redoing and people think it's
amazing what we're trying to doand we want to.
that's a lot more fun for ourteam to focus on the consumer
side of stuff, just becausethere's enough tools out there
that help you automate and doall these other things on the

(12:17):
B2B side.
For us, on the privacy aspectfor consumers, a lot of it takes
- from a design perspective andthen like a methodology and a
mindset perspective - a lot ofour privacy is privacy- by-
reduction and doing things theright way with lean data
practices.
But also, if you have fewernodes to attack from a privacy

(12:38):
standpoint, you are safer.
Right?
You are healthier online, ifyou want to use that analogy.
So, we want to help people gethealthier online so that they
can make more informed decisionsin the future, which will also
be a part of the platform thatwe're trying to build here.

I love it and I think it's absolutely a noble
cause.
We definitely need moreattention on consumer privacy
products and, as you explained,they're just a little harder to
bring to market for variousreasons.
I know you set this up as apublic benefit corporation or a
B Corp.
Can you share with ourlisteners, who may not be
familiar with that concept, thatwhat are the benefits to

(13:15):
designating the organization asa B Corp and just what is it
even involved to become a B Corp?

Yeah, so there's an organization out
there called B Corp that canlicense the branding and
marketing of, like you are BCorp and if you see that little
B logo around, that's actuallyan organization that keeps
people to a certain highstandards.
It can be around sustainability, it can be around privacy, it
can be around a lot of differenttopics; but, essentially it all

(13:42):
comes down to that you have atriple bottom line to your
business.
So, it's not just profit overpeople at all times.
There's some of the qualifierthat you have written in,
essentially to track as acompany.
Then, for Yorba's instance, weactually incorporated as a B
Corp, which in the legalconcepts that's called a public

(14:02):
benefit corporation.
So, we're enshrined from theget go to basically have that
triple bottom line and to makesure that we're doing good for
society.
Now we're tracking all the goodstuff, all the DEI, everything
that people try to.
Honestly, I would say, like lotsof larger corporations or even
later- stage startups, try tobadge themselves as this.
Very few companies, I wouldargue, do what Yorba's doing,

(14:24):
which is incorporate themselvesas that.
Because to your question aroundwhat are the benefits of that?
There aren't a lot.
So, there's more scrutiny to doit the right way from your
internal team that joins you atthe early stage company and if
you do find scale and stuff likethat, you do have more
reporting to do.
At the beginning they don'treally care until you find some

(14:44):
traction and stuff, but it doesput you more in a legally
enshrined thing where you haveto report out on that stuff.
The classic example in thestartup world for us is
investors don't like B-Corpsbecause it does not put profit
first and that scares them.
You can still be a very highlyprofitable company and there has
been these ones.
Kickstarter - you can go onB-Corp's website.

(15:06):
There's a decent number ofcompanies you've heard of.
Lemonade is a recent example ofa B-Corp that went public for a
lot of money - the insurancecompany that did things the
right way and they got somefunding as well.
Yeah, they got a lot of funding, so it can be done.
You just don't hear about it asmuch.
The case with Kickstarter -which I love personally and I

(15:26):
think founders love it, but Iwould say investors don't love
it - is the Founder ofKickstarter was not a B-Corp at
the beginning and basically wentthrough the process of becoming
a B-Corp to essentially limitthe outside investor noise on
his board.
In our founder world, he's alittle hero and our kind of
socially- conscious driven techstartup space.
You can go look it up.

(15:47):
There's definitely articlesabout investors not liking that
right.
But he changed midstream rightCause he would argue that the
B-Corp movement and stuff likethat didn't exist when he
started Kickstarter, really.
So he changed it to that.

It is fun.
I love that he used theincorporation there to actually
control his investors.
I think that's funny.

Yeah, it makes you like Kickstarter more, right
?

It does.
It's activism, but I think it'sfor the public's benefit, so
it's definitely something I canget behind.

Yeah, and I guess if you're asking, what's
the primary benefit of theB-Corp, it is a signal to the
market that you are trying to dothings a little bit differently
.
Right?
Ben and Jerry's is a B-Corp.
There's AllBirds, the shoes orthe 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 signalto the market that they're not

(16:42):
some huge mega-corp that's goingto just do whatever to squeeze
a buck.
So that's probably yourlong-term benefit of being a
B-corp, that flag that you'reflying.

Yeah, and I want to point out I don't think at
all that any criticism of itbeing virtue-signaling to be a
B-corp really makes any sense,because you're literally
standing by, you're creating theconstraints to the business, as
a forcing function to actuallystand by the values that you're
telling the public that you have.

(17:12):
If anything, you're not justsaying something and maybe in
your daily life not actuallydoing it.
You're literally forcing intothe design of everything of the
company, putting the public overprofits, and I think that's
amazing.
So, congrats on that and havingsuccessful product launch and
it sounds like a lot of peopleare really excited about what

(17:33):
you're building.

Yeah, it's early, but there's good signals
for sure.

Yeah, we definitely have a lot more to
talk about in terms of thedesign decisions you've made,
some architectural approaches.
But first, I know you talk alot about digital minimalism.
Can you unpack that a littlebit about what that means to you
and then how you see thatincreasing privacy?

Yeah, absolutely.
I love the digital minimalismmovement.
It was coined by a professor.
I think he's on the East Coastsomewhere.
I think in Baltimore orsomething - Cal Newport.
So, you'll hear, if you look atthe book (you can find it on
Amazon), digital minimalism isdefinitely a movement that is
starting out there.
There's a lot of podcasts on itnow, so there's no shortage of
content on it.
But really, what digitalminimalism is, it's this

(18:14):
decluttering of kind of all ofthese things that either don't
bring you joy or don't have autility in your life, and to get
rid of them.
Right?
For a lot of people, that'sgetting off social media.
That's deleting.
Go through your phone and justdelete all these apps.
Do you need all those apps?
Just delete all of them.
Turn off all the notificationson your phone so they can't keep
asking you for your time andattention.

(18:35):
I think Cal (the guy whostarted digital minimalism) and
then my friend Ryder (whostarted a company called Bullet
Journal, which embraces thattype of mindset and journaling
and kind of reflection), I'velearned a lot from them.
From a digital minimalismperspective, 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 deleteyour iMessage app because you

(18:59):
get too many text messages - youneed that.
You need to pick up your kidsfrom school, so you're going to
leave that on.
You're not going to delete that.
But, it's getting rid of allthese little things on the
secondary and tertiary of yourdigital lives so that you have
more time to focus on thepresent and to focus on the
things that really matter to you.
I think if you read into largerminimalism topics, you're

(19:22):
usually going to find that itrevolves around once again that
kind of decluttering aspect.
But it might be like looking atyour closet and you have 20
shirts and you don't want tojust throw this away.
Maybe you put five in a box fora month and if you still don't
need them in that month, you getrid of them.
So, Ryder says it best fromBullet Journal - there's a

(19:44):
physical weight to traditionalminimalism, and with digital
minimalism, there's more of acognitive weight.
It's a harder concept for peopleto understand at the beginning,
but there's been a lot morepeople since Covid that have
really turned onto that, justbecause they feel overloaded
with the digital marketing andall the people that - going back
to Yorba - want to be in arelationship with them.

(20:05):
They want your time; they wantyour attention.
So, for Yorba, where we fit inthat space is -any of these
podcasts or these how- to-start- as- a- digital-
minimalist - most of them aregoing to start with your inbox,
because that's where you'regoing to find the most noise in
the digital world.
Then, they're going to go towhat you pay for and what you
buy online, what yoursubscription are.

(20:25):
For Yorba, we have a whole pageon digital minimalism, because
we have a lot of members onYorba that have come through
that mindset and that digitalwellness, digital minimalism
mindset on Yorba.
If you come in there and you'vegot 450 mailing lists that you
subscribe to, you could get ridof half of those in like under
an hour by just unsubscribing inmass from the tool, and so

(20:46):
Yorba helps people reallykickstart, almost like a boot
camp for digital minimalism.
You can get going quicklytowards that intent of being
leaner online and having moretime to focus on the things that
matter to you.

That makes a lot of sense.
Thank you for that explanation.
I know that you've been workingwith Consumer Reports on their
Data Rights Protocol and theirapp Permission Slip.
Tell us a little bit about that.
What are you leveragingPermission Slip for?
What is Permission Slip?

Yeah, Consumer Reports has this amazing
Innovation Lab.
Permission Slip is an app thatthey created.
They do a lot of differentthings that are amazing and the
kind of consumer watch practicesis what you call them - like
anything to make consumers'lives better, to basically bring
a lens to somebody's watchingover the best interests of
consumers.

(21:34):
So, we love Consumer Reportsand they created this Permission
Slip app, which kind of turnedus on to what they've been doing
.
What Permission Slip is like anauthorized agent for you to
submit data deletion requeststhrough that platform.
Right now, they do that mainlyin California through CCPA and
Yorba joined .

(21:55):
.
.
They have a coalition of acouple of different companies,
which is this Data RightsProtocol Coalition you would
call it.
What they're trying to do, andwhat Consumer Reports is
organizing, because you do needlike a brand and organization
like them to make something likethis possible, because all
these startups working together,the scale won't be there.
Right?

(22:16):
So, they've organized this groupand there's two on the privacy
side which are like platformsthat work with businesses.
They're platforms like OneTrust or Mine OS that work with
specific companies to managedeletion requests of data.
Because by law, if you get anemail that says delete my data
in specific areas anywhere inEurope which is one of the

(22:37):
reasons that all of our teamsare slowly moving here but
anywhere in Europe andCalifornia and there's lots of
other states coming online withthese type of laws the company
has 30 days to delete all ofyour data.
So on the company side that canbe actually quite difficult
sometimes if you don't even knowwhere is all of Debra's data.
Do we have her email?
Do we have her bank account?
Do we have social securitynumber?
Sometimes they don't even know;it's in different systems and

(22:58):
stuff.
So, there's businesses that havestarted on that side, mainly
One Trust and a company calledTranscend, and those are two
partners - not partners, butthose are two participants in
the Data Rights ProtocolEcosystem on the B2B side, and
then Permission Slip and Yorba.
So, Permission Slip is thehomegrown app to test out this

(23:18):
process that Consumer Reportsbuilt, 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 fourmonths), all the things right
now that you have to go manuallydelete for logins and accounts
you have, you would be able to,if we have them linked through

(23:44):
these data players on the B2Bside, you can just delete them
automatically.
It creates a ticket, sends themthrough the protocol and
Consumer Reports has basicallystandardized the process to
delete your data from all thesecompanies.
So it's pretty amazing whatthey're doing and Yorba is super
excited to be a part of that.
Everyone we've met fromConsumer Reports has been
fantastic in helping with ourjourney as a small company,

(24:07):
because they totally could haveblown us off, to be honest with
you.
But, they've worked with us forover a year helping develop
this protocol.

That's pretty awesome.
Thank you so much forhighlighting their good work and
how you're working with them.
I think that's helpful for thisaudience of privacy engineers.
Hopefully we can have morepeople get involved in the
ecosystem.

That'd be great, because I think right now
there's just going to be fourpeople the two on each side
basically trying to launch it inQ2 or summer 2024.
Obviously, the more the merrier.
The more B2B businesses comeonline, the more companies will
be a part of the network.
So we're excited about whereit's going to go.

Awesome.
Let's talk about architecturefor a minute.
Yorba is building a personalCRM system.
What architectural designdecisions did you make that
affect privacy here?

Yeah, absolutely.
We've definitely taken some ofthe harder routes over time, but
also some of it's just we wantto.
Our CTO, David Shafoudi, usedto say that we have 'privacy by
scarcity,' right?
Nobody knows.
So, we exist for a while, so itgave us time to build up a lot
of these things.
We focus on Mozilla's lean datapractices, but we really focus
on collecting.
We don't collect a lot of data,we don't store data, we just

(25:20):
process it and then we putbasically the identifiers into
the CRM system so that you canaccess it again.
So, we might process somebody'sinbox, which we'll read through
the messages, but it's lookingfor keywords, basically, and our
models are just pulled that outso that we can create records
for you relationship records.
In Yorba, we try to use a lotof the encryption.
Everything's through secureaccess protocols, and I think a

(25:46):
lot of the stuff we try to do isin line almost with kind of
what we've met with in the past,like DuckDuckGo.
Duckduckgo tries to collect nodata.
Right?
So, privacy through - they justliterally connect no data.
Yorba has to collect some data,but we try to keep it as a very
minimal layer so that you canaccess actions that you want to
take on those specificrelationships and then we don't

(26:07):
store any of that.
Then, in the future, when wemight have even more data on
here, Yorba's intent is to notstore any data at all and that
we want to have.
Basically, people have to bring-your- own- storage type of
solution.
If you trust Google Drive, ifyou trust Proton Drive (which
we've talked to them); we'vealso got Web3 options that will

(26:28):
be coming online, which I thinkwe'll talk about.
But, our goal is just to beable to encrypt that data, only
access it when we need to, butit's actually stored on your
local devices.
So, those are some of thedecisions that we make along the
way.
We also on the analytics thing.
On the analytics front, we useMatomo, which is a fantastic
platform that allows us toanonymize all user information.

(26:48):
So, we don't have anyone's userinformation in Matomo.
So, we can see analytics thathelp us improve the platform,
but we can't see that Debra camein here and was thinking about
deleting Netflix.
We can only see high-levelgoals and actions that we've set
up through there and it's theidentifier that is associated
with our members.
I think it's like a string of20 letters and numbers.

(27:09):
Right, we would never know whoyou are.

Yeah, for Matomo - they've been around a long
time.
I definitely want to highlightthem to this audience because
they're competitors of GoogleAnalytics, but they do the
analytics in aprivacy-preserving way.
So, speak to us a little bitabout what is the quality of the
product like compared to Google.
So many people will be likeprobably thinking, if you switch

(27:33):
to something else, you're goingto have an inferior product.
I know that's not the case withMatomo, that there's actually
really great analytics.
So, what's your experience beenin terms of the quality of the
analytics while still preservingprivacy?

Yeah, I would argue that it's actually way
more flexible than GoogleAnalytics, because Google
Analytics is a tool that has toserve the mass market.
Right?
It needs to be super easy tounderstand and packaged for a
much broader audience, whereaswith Matomo, maybe there's a
little bit more of a learningcurve at the beginning.
From Matomo, but the analyticsthat it can provide you and the

(28:08):
goals and the segments and allthat, you get way more granular
data that you would want on howpeople actually use your product
, where they come from and stuff.
You can cut it up in all thesedifferent ways.
With Google Analytics, I thinkit's fine for what it is for
sure, which I think is betterfor websites than it would be
for products, but they'vedefinitely tried to create
products type of analytics toolsrecently.

(28:28):
But for us, Matomo doeseverything we needed to do and
more.
We've reached out to thembefore for support desk tickets
and they've been fantastic.
We've also used Fathom in thepast on our website.
Right now, our website'sa mix of things, to be honest.
Yeah, and the other thing thatwe like with Matomo, which we
haven't done it yet because it'shad them prioritized in our

(28:49):
backlog, but you can host it onyour own servers.
Right?
So, whereas Google Analyticsyou consent to help in make
Google smarter across all thesethings, by using Google
Analytics, with Matomo you cankeep it on your own private
instance so that data doesn'tactually ever leave your servers
.
For a European-based companywith GDPR and stuff, that's

(29:11):
highly important that we're nottaking users' data - even if
it's anonymized, being groupedin and repackaged and resold for
the greater data platforms thatare Google.
So, basically, our members cansleep well that night knowing
that it's just for us tobasically improve the platform
for them.
It's for nobody else and nobodyelse sees it.
That's why we like with Matomo.

Yeah, that's great.
Thank you so much.
I wasn't even trying to justget you to talk about how
awesome a particular product is,like a particular company's
product with Matomo.
It's more that Google's thestatus quo.
Most people, they set up a newwebsite or product, that's
literally it's just no brainerto them.
That's what everyone uses, it'sstatus quo, so that's what they
go use.
But, I want people here in thisconversation to understand that

(29:54):
no, you have a choice and ifyou're doing privacy by design
and you have design decisions tomake, 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 thingsabout it.
It's gotten better over time.

When we talked to their support guy, he was
based out of Paris.
I don't know if the wholecompany was based out of Paris,
but he was from France.
I don't know if it'sheadquartered out of France, or
I think it's a remote- firstthing, 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 overthe last year or two that we've
been using it.
The interface has gotten a lotbetter, but it's a very powerful

(30:33):
tool.
We don't want to highlight justone product or tool, but I
guess, going back to yourearlier question about why be a
PBC; what's the benefit of that?
It's, I guess, what we'rehighlighting right now with
Matomo, although I don't evenknow if they're.
.
.
I think they're a nonprofit.
I don't know.
I'm actually not sure howthey're structured.
But, because they are doingthings the right way, and even
if it's a little less convenientat the beginning, you can tell

(30:53):
that companies like ours, thatmakes a difference.

Absolutely.
Thank you for that.
So, we're still talking aboutarchitecture here and I'm really
excited to bring up the conceptof decentralized identity,
because I think a lot of yourlong term plan with Yorba really
centers around decentralizedidentity, decentralized storage;
and, as you mentioned before,email address has been used as a

(31:17):
primary key identifier forindividuals for so long across
organizations.
You're flipping a script herewith decentralized identity by
giving people the power to usetheir identifier to find stuff
across their inbox, theirrelationships and with platforms
, as you said.
Tell us a little bit about thebenefits of using decentralized

(31:37):
identity, which is also referredto as self-sovereign identity.
You're never going to hearsomeone like Google talk about
self-sovereign identity, likeit's a little more disruptive to
general business, of the ideaof getting everyone to be
self-sovereign, but you willhear like a large company like
Google talk about decentralizedidentity.
It's specifically like whereall the logins, all the social
logins that we use, whether itlogin with Facebook, login with

(32:01):
Google that's a decentralizedidentity architectural design
choice.
So, yeah, tell us a little bitabout the benefits of using
decentralized identity and thenhow you're often thinking about
even moving into self-sovereignidentity and what that means.

Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, it's definitely.
.
.
you could argue that the initialresearch paper, deck,
presentation, whatever you wantto call it that started Yorba
was mainly around this topic.
Everything we built around theCRM and stuff was to galvanize
people around the problem of thebloated Internet.
So, where we want to go is moreon the self-sovereign identity.
We think it's crazy that theplatforms have all owned this

(32:39):
login with Facebook, login withGoogle, and just how long email
has persisted as the primaryidentifier of identity online,
which is crazy, and I don'tthink it's going away anytime
soon.
So, we're not naive to that.
We're trying to take web 2patterns and put web3
infrastructure beneath them atYorba, where we want to go,

(33:00):
because self-sovereign identityand decentralized identity has a
lot of benefits.
The main ones, really, which iswhy you'll never hear the big
companies really embrace themare it gives individuals control
over their personal information.
It also allows you to onlyshare what's necessary and
enhances the privacy andsecurity when you do that.
So, if I have control of it, ifI only have to share what I

(33:22):
want to share with the platform.
So, going back to how Yorbahelps broker relationships
between people and platforms,right now we're all about
reducing all the bloat.
The future will be aboutbrokering the better things.
So if a consumer wants to be ina relationship with Netflix,
you know what you're sharingwith them.
You're sharing this block ofinformation, but you're in that

(33:42):
in a transparent way.
I think that the way thatdecentralized storage works
obviously is from a privacyaudience, which they can educate
me more on.
I can educate them on it, butfor sure, if you want to attack
or try to.
.
.when you're putting all thistype of stuff in one area, it's
super scary.
That is the same case withYorba.
So the goal that we have withYorba is to be able to load
something that looks like apersonal profile that you can

(34:04):
use is identify an agent toconnect to different platforms
around the Internet; but, at thesame time, that information
that's stored for that isactually decentralized into all
of these pods around theinternet.
So, it would be very hard foryou to ever break into that.
There is no central source.
There is no "We just broken in,stole all these passwords or

(34:25):
all these people's socialsecurity numbers, because
everything would be broken downinto these federated storage
pods around the world.
So that word is organizingessentially into a easy to
digest interface.
Then when you log out it's goneagain right Back into its nodes
, so you can ever really hackYorba is the goal.

That's pretty exciting.
If you have centralized storagesomewhere, then the criminal
hackers are going to go wherethe money is, which is where you
don't try to hack into thatlarge storage, whether it's an
S3 bucket or some other storageand so that's going to want to
make sure those things are allconfigured appropriately.
There's all these challengeswith doing that.
So, yeah, it definitely seemsto make things safer by

(35:05):
decentralizing storage.
Then, with decentralizedidentity or something like using
a social login, it's helpfulthat you don't have to remember
all these other identities whenyou're logging in.
But, if you're using somethinglike login with social media
companies, they're able tocontinue to track what you're
doing on these third party sitesbecause they know you logged in

(35:26):
now to this site.
Right?
So, you're basically, if you'reusing the social media
decentralized identity logins,then you're adding to the
surveillance machine, almost.
But, if you're using somethingthat's maybe branded more
self-sovereign identity, it'sstill decentralized identity,
but something like what you'redoing is you're not tracking

(35:48):
across websites as people arelogging in.
So, you connect thatdecentralized identity with
decentralized storage and you'rejust you're making a person's
personal infrastructure moresecure, safer and less likely of
a target for hackers.

For sure, and I think that's what we're hoping
that the secret sauce could thiskind of next phase of the
Internet around how peoplemanage relationships is
basically essentially a CRMsystem meets private profiles.
So, some of the things built onkind of Web3 and kind of future
tech type of privacy andsecurity systems and pods
beneath it.
What looks like it and I likemy co-founder of Ruka and my

(36:26):
co-founder of Yorba is a verytalented designer named Nolan
Cabeje.
He designs these things and itlooks super simple, but there's
a lot going on behind the scenes.
That's what we're trying to dois we're trying to bring a
minimalist type of platform thathas a lot of power underneath
it and essentially connectingCRMs and profiles in a private
PBC benefit corporation way andhoping that galvanizes a big

(36:50):
enough community that we canmake real change without these
things are done online.

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 howdo you see the next year shaping
up?

The next year.
We've definitely got bucketsthat we want to get into.
We obviously, with the wave ofpeople that came from the
TechCrunch article, right now weare just reaching out, talking
to premium members on theplatform and users on the
platform to see what we can dobetter.
We're working on betterscanning.
So, our models - basicallybeing able to do better scanning
, better processing, fasterprocessing and then be able to

(37:29):
really focus in on.
Right now, we're all aboutaggregating this data and
organizing it for you and oncewe're good enough at that
our next bridge will be intogetting the direct actions that
you can do for Yorba better, soall the data rights protocol
stuff that we talked aboutearlier.
So, getting those better,getting our unsubscribes better,
our cancel subscriptions better.

(37:49):
Then, once those are good,those one-to-one actions, really
working a lot on automationsand scripts basically and what
we call like the YoBot.
Essentially, you could say Ijust want to remove anything
that I don't read this much orsomething I haven't logged into
in this set duration, and wejust run scripts through your
data and basically startremoving and pruning and

(38:09):
cleaning things up for you.
So, a little bookkeeper,housekeeper type of automated
bot that will start doing thaton your behalf.
So, make the process a littleless manual; but first, we have
to keep cleaning and gettingbetter at the scan so we can do
that.

That would be really helpful to me personally,
because I've had my emailaddress since gMail was still in
beta, you know, when it firstcame out, and I have a lot of
junk that keeps getting sent tome and I need to unsubscribe and
I don't know 30,000 unreademails over the course of 15, 20
years.
I could definitely use somehelp with cleaning up my inbox.

Yeah, it's crazy and like the dark patterns
that companies use these days.
We were in private data lastyear and we have people being
like "I unsubscribe from thisbut I keep getting it, and so
now I started grouping those sothat it's easier for people to
understand.
But if you think youunsubscribe from, like, a
Betterment email on Tuesday, youmight have just unsubscribed
from Betterment Tuesdaynotification email.
You might still be on 20different things.

(39:05):
So that's how companies thesedays they have to, because of
the CANSPAM act, they have toallow you to unsubscribe from
emails and we hope eventuallythere'll be something like the
spam act on deleting youraccounts, which I know there's
people working on at thepolitical level.
But, if you think about the waythat companies do all this, it's
crazy and we've learned a lotover the last two years because,
like, they just really make ithard for you to break up with

(39:27):
them, as we all know.
When you actually see that inYorba's CRM and you're like, "oh
, wow, I get 14 emails fromLinkedIn.
So when I thought I wassubscribed from that one thing,
I was just unscribing from theTuesday 10am coffee email, I
still get 19 more.
So, you do have to unsubscribeone- by- one from all of those

(39:50):
currently, unless you just turnthem all off.
It's crazy, but we're trying tocreate real tools for people to
fight back.

Yeah, I love it.
I love it.
It's empowering people.
What's the best way thatlisteners can learn more about
Yorba or can reach out to youand maybe collaborate or get a
demo?

Yeah, absolutely.
Yorba's in open public beta.
It's free to sign up, free toscan, see all the stuff that
you've accrued.
Yeah, just go to Yorba.
co and you'll see all the funstuff that we're doing on there.
And, yeah, sign up.
Join our community.
We'd love to have you.

Thank you so much.
Do you have anything else youwant to leave the audience with
before we close today?

No, I think we've covered everything and
yeah, I think it's going to be afun ride, so join us.

Excellent, Chris .
Thank you so much for joiningus today on The Shifting Privacy
Left Podcast.
Awesome.
Until next Tuesday, everyone,when we'll be back with engaging
content and another great guestor guests.
Thanks for joining us this weekon Shifting Privacy Left.
Make sure to visit our website,ShiftingPrivacyLeft.
com, where you can subscribe toupdates so you'll never miss a

(41:02):
show.
While you're at it, if youfound 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 privacyplatform and sponsor of this
show.
To learn more, go to provado.
ai.
Be sure to tune in next Tuesdayfor a new episode.

(41:22):
Bye for now.

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