Launching Kanary

Published

Feb 15, 2023

Speaking Up About Privacy

It's been 9 months since we posted on Reddit about the initial idea for Kanary. We wanted to see if others saw the problems we saw with existing privacy services. Since that post and initial encouragement, we've been building software, learning from feedback, and gaining support from groups we admire like the Mozilla Foundation. As we've gained traction, we've become even more focused on helping people regain and protect their privacy. We couldn't have made this progress without those who saw our vision, trusted our team, and spoke up about the privacy problems they experience.

To date, we've taken down exposed emails, phone numbers, addresses, names, and passwords from over 700 websites and continue to monitor a growing list of 2,000+. We've worked with lawyers, teachers, grandparents, founders, executives, abuse survivors, community leaders to help them quickly remove information that puts them at risk.

We've learned that the most concerning sites continue to scrape and post personal information even after it's taken down once. We've had to follow up with 5 different emails and support desks to remove information from the worst data brokers. This is why our team continues to manually validate and escalate removal requests. This is why we continue to write blog posts and share tips for how to keep your information from getting out there in the first place.

We've learned that just because a company asks for more identification or asks you to create an account, doesn't mean you have to do it. If you respectfully decline to share more information, companies will often remove your information without it. Some websites are extremely respectful and will take down information with a single email. This is why our team continues to offer a product that costs less than $5 a month. Our goal is to lower the barriers to entry and offer an affordable privacy service.

We've learned that personal information connects and affects our communities: 80% of our subscribers end up finding and removing risks for their friends and family. This is why we encourage our subscribers to invite their community to join Kanary and add their family members to their account free of charge.

We've also learned that with incidences of harassment and vigilantism growing, many people feel like there aren't tools available to protect them. This is why we continue to build with urgency and work with those who reach out to us asking for assistance or looking for advice.

With these lessons in mind, we launched a couple big changes.