Show HN: Find out what Facebook knows about you, and clean it up
ethi.meHey, Mike here, cofounder at Ethi!
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).
> We don't use your data for anything else.
Does this mean that in addition to Facebook, you too will have access to user data? How exactly does this work?
So if you want to find out what Facebook knows about you, you have to download your data from Facebook. It's a JSON dump which does very little on its own to inform you what all of it actually means. We wanted to make a tool to easily analyse and understand the data.
You upload it to Ethi, but your data is encrypted in your browser before you upload, stored encrypted, and only decrypted in a serverless cloud instance to analyse and process it (there's a lot of data analysis that happens) before being stored encrypted again.
So we can't see your data when it's stored, and it's encrypted nearly all the time except when it's being processed or you're viewing it.
So the whole idea here is to analyze the data dump from fb. I have checked the website, but it seems that you put efforts to reverse-engineer the logic in the dump and how it is stored. A follow up question. Other than data dump, is there any other sources you use?