Jumbo may very well be a nightmare for the tech giants, however a savior for the victims of their shady privateness practices.
Jumbo saves you hours in addition to embarrassment by routinely adjusting 30 Facebook privateness settings to offer you extra safety, and by deleting your outdated tweets after saving them to your cellphone. It may even erase your Google Search and Amazon Alexa historical past, with clean-up options for Instagram and Tinder within the works.
The startup emerges from stealth at present to launch its Jumbo privateness assistant app on iPhone (Android coming quickly). What might take a ton of time and analysis to do manually will be correctly dealt with by Jumbo with just a few faucets.

The query is whether or not tech’s greatest firms will permit Jumbo to function, or squash its entry. Facebook, Twitter and the remaining actually ought to have constructed options like Jumbo’s themselves or made them simpler to make use of, since they may enhance individuals’s confidence and notion which may enhance utilization of their apps. But since their enterprise fashions typically depend on gathering and exploiting as a lot of your information as attainable, and squeezing engagement from extra broadly seen content material, the giants are incentivized to seek out excuses to dam Jumbo.
“Privacy is something that people want, but at the same time it just takes too much time for you and me to act on it,” explains Jumbo founder Pierre Valade, who previously constructed beloved high-design calendar app Sunrise that he offered to Microsoft in 2015. “So you’re left with two options: you can leave Facebook, or do nothing.”
Jumbo makes it simple sufficient for even the lazy to guard themselves. “I’ve used Jumbo to clean my full Twitter, and my personal feeling is: I feel lighter. On Facebook, Jumbo changed my privacy settings, and I feel safer.” Inspired by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he believes the platforms have misplaced the proper to steward a lot of our information.
Valade’s Sunrise pedigree and plan to observe Dropbox’s bottom-up freemium technique by launching premium subscription and enterprise options has already attracted traders to Jumbo. It’s raised a $3.5 million seed spherical led by Thrive Capital’s Josh Miller and Nextview Ventures’ Rob Go, who “both believe that privacy is a fundamental human right,” Valade notes. Miller offered his link-sharing app Branch to Facebook in 2014, so his funding exhibits these with inside information see a necessity for Jumbo. Valade’s six-person workforce in New York will use the cash to develop new options and attempt to begin a privateness second.
How Jumbo works
First let’s take a look at Jumbo’s Facebook settings fixes. The app asks that you simply punch in your username and password by a mini-browser open to Facebook as a substitute of utilizing the standard Facebook Connect function. That instantly may get Jumbo blocked, and we’ve requested Facebook if it will likely be allowed. Then Jumbo can regulate your privateness settings to Weak, Medium, or Strong controls, although it by no means makes any privateness settings looser in case you’ve already tightened them.
Valade particulars that since there aren’t any APIs for altering Facebook settings, Jumbo will “act as ‘you’ on Facebook’s website and tap on the buttons, as a script, to make the changes you asked Jumbo to do for you.” He says he hopes Facebook makes an API for this, although it’s extra prone to see his script as in opposition to insurance policies.
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For instance, Jumbo can change who can look you up utilizing your cellphone quantity to Strong – Friends solely, Medium – Friends of associates, or Weak – Jumbo doesn’t change the setting. Sometimes it takes a stronger stance. For the flexibility to point out you advertisements primarily based on contact information that advertisers have uploaded, each the Strong and Medium settings disguise all advertisements of this sort, whereas Weak retains the setting as is.

The full record of what Jumbo can regulate consists of Who can see your future posts?, Who can see the individuals?, Pages and lists you observe, Who can see your folks record?, Who can see your sexual desire?, Do you need Facebook to have the ability to acknowledge you in images and movies?, Who can submit in your timeline?, and Review tags individuals add to your posts the tags seem on Facebook? The full record will be discovered right here.
For Twitter, you’ll be able to select if you wish to take away all tweets ever, or which might be older than a day, week, month (really helpful), or three months. Jumbo by no means sees the info, as all the things is processed regionally in your cellphone. Before deleting the tweets, it archives them to a Memories tab of its app. Unfortunately, there’s presently no option to export the tweets from there, however Jumbo is constructing Dropbox and iCloud connectivity quickly, which is able to work retroactively to obtain your tweets. Twitter’s API limits imply it will probably solely erase 3,200 tweets of yours each few days, so prolific tweeters could require a number of rounds.
Its different integrations are extra simple. On Google, it deletes your search historical past. For Alexa, it deletes the voice recordings saved by Amazon. Next it needs to construct a option to clear out your outdated Instagram images and movies, and your outdated Tinder matches and chat threads.
Across the board, Jumbo is designed to by no means see any of your information. “There isn’t a server-side component that we own that processes your data in the cloud,” Valade says. Instead, all the things is processed regionally in your cellphone. That means, in principle, you don’t should belief Jumbo together with your information, simply to correctly alter what’s on the market. The startup plans to open supply a few of its stack to show it isn’t spying on you.
While there are different apps that may clear your tweets, nothing else is designed to be a full-fledged privateness assistant. Perhaps it’s a little bit of idealism to assume these tech giants will allow Jumbo to run as supposed. Valade says he hopes if there’s sufficient person assist, the privateness backlash could be too huge if the tech giants blocked Jumbo. “If the social network blocks us, we will disable the integration in Jumbo until we can find a solution to make them work again.”
But even when it does get nixed by the platforms, Jumbo may have began an important dialog about how privateness needs to be dealt with offline. We’ve left management over privateness defaults to firms that earn cash once we’re much less protected. Now it’s time for that management to shift to the palms of the person.