The Hardest Part of Building a Privacy Tool

Here's the hard part about building a privacy-focused product, which probably isn’t all that surprising:

You constantly run into tension between the product you want to build and the principles behind it.

DoxxScore is a tool that helps people understand their digital exposure. To do that effectively, we need to ask the right questions. That includes your online habits, your digital footprint, and the decisions you've made (or haven't made) about your personal information over the years.

In other words:

we need to do some of the same things that make people uncomfortable when data brokers do it.

The difference is:

1. consent

2. transparency

3. purpose.

Users opt in. They know exactly what we're checking. And the entire point is to help them reduce their exposure, not profit from it.

But that tension forced us to think very carefully about how we handle data, what we store (as little as possible), and how to communicate what we're doing at every step.

Building in the privacy space means your product has to live up to a higher standard. Your users are privacy-conscious by definition. They'll read your privacy policy. They'll ask hard questions.

And they should.