Why we built Yorba
We started Yorba because the way the Internet functions today and the direction in which it’s heading need to be rethought and reset in a way that is more secure, more sustainable, and more beneficial to the billions of people who use it.
To help make that happen, our broad goal was (and is) to apply user-centric, task-driven design principles to the Internet at large. We ultimately found that the best way to do that was to focus on the ways people navigate their dozens-to-hundreds of online accounts and the ways those accounts interact with your data and personal information.
The modern Internet is not a product of coherent, thoughtful, premeditated design: it is instead the product of haphazard and reactionary development. Like a massive ship gathering barnacles as it plods along, the Internet is weighed down by an unending accumulation of business models and behavioral loops that stick around even after they no longer make sense. Think, for example, of the seismic industry shifts caused by Facebook lying about its video numbers a few years ago: even once the lie had been exposed, the layoffs, closures, acquisitions, and changed content consumption habits driven by the “pivot to video” did not simply un-happen. Much of the current state of the Internet and how we use it is the cumulative product of happenstance and flawed logic that we’ve all essentially just shrugged at and dealt with. We need a way to circumvent these legacy models before we can implement any new, better model.
New online platforms and services spring up all the time, many of them offering some compelling value or utility to our personal and professional lives. But the dominant online players – Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al – consistently find clever ways to co-opt them. Because the modern Internet is primarily built on an economic model driven by harvesting data to sell or optimize advertisements, almost every new service requires you to create an account in order to access key features. Depending on whom you ask, the average internet user now has somewhere between 90 and 300 (!) online accounts. Some have significantly more than that. Actively managing 100+ accounts requires an unrealistic amount of energy. Without these big tech giants, our only choices are either:
Wildly impractical: create, maintain, and perpetually update 90+ unique passwords (each with 15+ characters, varying cases, numbers, and special characters) to preserve our security
Wildly unsafe: reuse the same few passwords in dozens of different places and simply hope not one of these 90+ services get hacked, to preserve our sanity
Seeing this, big tech stepped in and offered a third option: instead of even enter a password at all, just create and access your account via OAuth, using the credentials you use to log in to Google, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, and they’ll handle the rest. Now, by keeping just one account secure, you can thereby keep many more accounts secure. But as with all things big tech, this useful service is granted in exchange for even deeper encroachment upon our personal information. When, say, Google gives us the option of funneling all of our sign-ins through them and their security apparatus in exchange for granting them the ability to track and exploit our online behavior even when we’re not using Google, the problem is not just the violation of our privacy: it’s that it might still be the best option available to us. That must change. Constant surveillance as a business model is not good for you and it’s not good for society – and we’ve spoken to a lot of businesses who say that they’re not getting much out of big tech’s OAuth either.
Password managers offer a solid alternative solution, but don’t go far enough: they treat one of the symptoms of the problem, but don’t further a cure for the problem itself. In the long term, that kind of halfway solution is just putting a topical cream on the surface of a rash that won’t stop growing, and acting like everything is okay while the illness causing the rash gets deeper into the internal operating system of the internet. Google, for example, offers its own capable password management services built into Chrome: that’s helpful for security purposes, but it creates a perverse incentive to force users to stay within Google’s data vortex in order to access all of their own accounts. It doesn’t help cure the disease: it helps the parasite keep its host bodies just healthy enough to keep draining its nutrients.
So as a starting point, we set out to create a trustworthy service that can track down someone’s entire digital footprint (i.e. all of their accounts) and then help them to clean it up, granting them genuine control their privacy and relationships with online accounts without requiring an overwhelming amount of work or unusual amount of tech savvy on their part. There are some interesting tools emerging in niche sectors and with blockchain enthusiasts: they might evolve into viable solutions for b2b, techies, and crypto kids, but not for our CEO’s 60-year-old parents in Nebraska.
We started there because it doesn’t require much cooperation from other businesses. But further on down the road, we’ll be pursuing that cooperation: our goals include actually building that ethical OAuth option to open and access accounts. Instead of surreptitiously using that tool for surveillance capitalism, our radical plan is to simply charge people a few bucks for it and then leave them alone.
There are a few relatively popular services out there that similarly position themselves as decluttering online relationships, but we found that they’re either not intuitive enough or (even worse) doing some of the same shady stuff that we’re explicitly trying to avoid. We wanted to create a simple but comprehensive utility for the next generation of the internet, aligned with the best interests of the people who use it. To reassure our community (and ourselves) that we’re legitimately committed to improving our society, and that we won’t let profit motives compromise our mission, we incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation. Yorba is, at its core, a digital wellness platform. Our goal of helping people better understand the digital footprint they’ve created over the past two decades of modern internet use, so that they can prune + organize it and enjoy the mental and financial benefits of doing so is – formally and legally – on equal footing with our goal of building a successful business.
Yorba was started by individuals who have built, used, and seen the powerful tools that companies employ to manage their users: tools designed to keep users fixed on the same patterns, stuck in subscriptions they don’t use, pegged to accounts they haven’t logged into in years. It’s all dead data that nobody has the time or mental space to remember, but can nonetheless be used against you in one way or another. If you’re reading this, your digital footprint is ‘overweight.’ There’s a ton of shit there that you don’t need and would be better off without. No question. We guarantee it.
Every modern company has a sophisticated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform and a bunch of marketing automation tools that dictate the terms of your relationship with them. Time-tested techniques (and some shady ones, like “Dark UX” that makes exiting the relationship prohibitively difficult), basically guarantee that their business remains a permanent part of your online life. Until now, there have not been any tools that flip this script and allow you to dictate the terms of your relationships with businesses: no CRM equivalent for actual human beings to use. So we made one. And we’re painstakingly concerned with building trust and transparency, so that people can use Yorba and the platforms that allow bi-directional Yorba Access and off-platform account management with the peace of mind that we’re not trying to sneak anything past them, exploit them, or screw them over.
We’re not naive: we know this will only fully work if businesses are willing to get on board and work with us, and they will only do so if there’s something in it for them. Yorba is also meant to be a powerful platform for companies to improve their customer data and reduce their account management overhead (by allowing us to handle it for them). While it might seem like they’ll be ostensibly losing data by permitting more mutually beneficial user relationships, the reality is that much of the data they currently have – especially when it was sourced indirectly and involuntarily (e.g. inferred from social media integrations, or from tracking techniques like cookies and keylogging) – is old, inaccurate, and/or out of date. Consider a service you access via Facebook, whose basic knowledge of you is essentially just the stuff they pulled from Facebook, then ask yourself: when was the last time you updated your information on Facebook? We’re actively building partnerships in our private beta with companies that prefer a reasonable amount of accurate, up-to-date, voluntarily-provided data from Yorba over a massive pile of old and inaccurate data.
In a way, we see Yorba as a kind of halfway house for the internet and its citizens. The goal of a halfway house is to help reformed citizens work their way up to self-sufficiency so that they can productively reenter society. The goal of Yorba is to help our community – primarily our users, but also the businesses we partner with – reform the way they manage their lives on the internet so that they can reenter the online world with healthier, more sustainable, more productive habits and business models. We want to help online businesses realize that treating people fairly and making money are not mutually exclusive.
We dream of a world where people have reasonable expectations of privacy and transparency; a world where someone doesn’t have to spend 250 hours reading Terms of Service contracts just to kind-of understand all of the things a normal online life requires them to ‘agree’ to, because their accounts are centrally managed through a service that, for once, isn’t trying to trick them into thinking they’re getting things for ‘free’. A company that offers some straightforward benefits in return for (eventually) charging a transparent and reasonable fee.
To do so, we’ll need strength in numbers. The more people join Yorba, the more attractive the idea of agreeing to an ethical arrangement will be to the businesses whose services you’ve come to rely on.
Join Yorba, and help us build a simpler, safer, better internet.
