kanary

Yikes, yep, most of these brokers have strict cloudflare settings that block you if you use Tor or a VPN, are outside the US, or disable js.

We'd like Cloudflare to be a little more helpful, but they just let harmful sites block people who don't want to share their info / location / browser fingerprint under the guise of 'stopping bots'.

hello!

Yael does incredible work on this repo & we have contributed in the past (we'd like to more in the future too!).

Doing this work is tough/timeconsuming but can be done DIY. We're working on automating it at scale. YC gave us a grant in 2018 for this work.

Automating this sounds simple but gets extremely complex to scale. - evading cloudflare - solving captchas - managing site footprint (think about google's algo to crawl the web) - ux / product design (how should we communicate to members if a site is an a$$?) - identity matching...

At the end of the day, we need better regulations in the US to help us wrangle the data broker industry. Hand in hand with more advanced technology for monitoring and holding this industry accountable... that seems the best path fwd.

We've written about the need for policy reform in the US. https://www.kanary.com/blog/privacy-protection-through-regul...

And offer a deleteme-like service with broad coverage and an affordable rate for removals and monitoring. We received a grant from YC for our work in 2019.

https://www.kanary.com/

If you want to be more aggressive, you can pay a service like Kanary that Googles you, submits removal requests, and then does a deeper search across data brokers and people search sites and submits removal requests as well.

It's unfortunate, but useful if keeping your info off these sites is important for safety/security. We're advocating for the CFPB to tighten regulation so this isn't such a challenge for people (and companies).

If interested in the technical challenges of scaling this, we're also hiring.

Oh hello! This was a years-long process. Appreciate the call out.

Kanary | Senior Backend Software Engineer | Seattle, Remote (US or Canada) | $150k base + generous equity

We’re building software to scrub your private info (home address, phone number, emails) off the public internet. We find and remove this data through large scale browser automation. We’ve raised over 1mm in preseed funding with top VCs (2048, First Star) and privacy-leaders (Mozilla Foundation, DuckDuckGo). Today we have thousands of paying customers, all without a single dollar of paid advertising.

We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to own the challenge of scaling our system in speed, quality and scope. You may be a fit if you have experience rapidly building APIs, managing Kubernetes deployments, solving n+1 queries, and/or scaling browser automation with our stack (AWS, Python/Django, and Go). Everyone at Kanary is involved in product development and experimentation, so you may also be a great fit if you have experience doing CTF challenges or growth engineering work.

Here are some of the things you might work on:

- Minimize QA time and code repetition by extending our templating language using Go. - Experiment with novel approaches for anonymously traversing the web (captcha solving, browser fingerprinting, residential IPs). Embrace the cat and mouse game of working against the bad guys. - Performance engineering - identify and implement optimizations across application code (API, serializers, data models), database and deployment configuration

Compensation depends on level, experience, and potential but we aim to be fair and competitive with equity and salary. If this sounds like fun, reach out to our founder, rachel[at]kanary.com.

To help our team respond to you fast, format your subject like: “HN Senior Backend Engineer”

Learn more about our company here! https://www.kanary.com/

Kanary | Backend Engineer | Seattle, Remote (US or Canada) | $120k base + generous equity

We’re scaling an automated security risk detection and data removal service for individuals. You might be a fit if you have experience doing CTF challenges, distributed systems work and/or web scraping. If you want to be on the ground level of building the most advanced automation platform for personal data security, privacy, and safety, keep reading.

As a backend-focused engineer, you’ll own projects involving infrastructure, devops, data flows, and APIs. But as an early startup teammate, you’ll work across all parts of our product, marketing, and strategy. Some examples:

* Using hardware and software to navigate the web anonymously * Using LLM agents to build internal tools for developers and support * Reverse engineer identification systems meant to harvest data and discriminate access

We’re a YC-backed team with previous startup, growth, and engineering experience at IBM, Shopify, Northwestern, Stanford, Tableau, and law enforcement. We’re backed by top VCs (2048, First Star) and privacy-leaders (Mozilla Foundation, DuckDuckGo). Together, we launched our product and 9x’d our membership - without paid advertising.

Tactically, our software runs on AWS and we use Django and React. Strong knowledge of Python, Go, and SQL is a plus. If you learn quickly and love the mission, but don’t have these core skills, please still reach out. We care most about people who are fantastic teammates over industry experts.

If this sounds like fun, say hi: rachel[at]kanary.com https://www.kanary.com/

Do you plan to shuffle the domain? If this hits scale, sites pretty quickly blacklist domains. imo anonaddy is best at scale but still gets blocked.

priority is PST timezone or within a few hours

Kanary | Backend Engineer | Remote, Seattle | $120k base + generous equity

We’re scaling an automated security risk detection and data removal service for individuals. You might be a fit if you have experience doing CTF challenges, distributed systems work and/or web scraping. If you want to be on the ground level of building the most advanced automation platform for personal data security, privacy, and safety, keep reading.

As a backend-focused engineer, you’ll own projects involving infrastructure, devops, data flows, and APIs. But as an early startup teammate, you’ll work across all parts of our product, marketing, and strategy. Some examples:

* Using hardware and software to navigate the web anonymously * Using LLM agents to build internal tools for developers and support * Reverse engineer identification systems meant to harvest data and discriminate access

We’re a YC-backed team with previous startup, growth, and engineering experience at IBM, Shopify, Northwestern, Stanford, Tableau, and law enforcement. We’re backed by top VCs (2048, First Star) and privacy-leaders (Mozilla Foundation, DuckDuckGo). Together, we launched our product and 9x’d our membership - without paid advertising.

Tactically, our software runs on AWS and we use Django and React. Strong knowledge of Python, Go, and SQL is a plus. If you learn quickly and love the mission, but don’t have these core skills, please still reach out. We care most about people who are fantastic teammates over industry experts.

If this sounds like fun, say hi: rachel[at]kanary.com https://www.kanary.com/

The data broker market is ~$250B, it's not all personal data, but the market for personal data to target these scams is huge. The worst part is many data brokers get their data from government sources like the state DMVs: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/dmvs-are-making-a...

Kanary | Lead Frontend Engineer | Engineering Intern | REMOTE (PST Ideal)

Become an early member of a fast-growing, yc-backed startup.

Kanary's mission is to help people protect their privacy & safety online. Our first service finds exposed data and automates the removal process. Our vision is to build easy to use, interconnected privacy products. We believe people need better tools to prove authenticity without exposing identity.

We're venture-backed, working with mission-aligned leaders from DuckDuckGo, Mozilla Firefox, Datadog, Github, and several top VCs.

Details: https://www.thekanary.com/join-the-team

Please reach out & say hacker news sent you. I’d love to hear from you: rachel [at] thekanary [dot] com