Frequently asked questions

Nope. Never. For more on that, check out our Privacy Policy.

We charge a reasonable monthly fee in exchange for a useful service.

Many online businesses offer services that are ‘free’ to the user. They do this because their users are not their customers. Their actual customers are the businesses to whom they sell their actual product: personal data they extract from you, their user. That’s why they all make you create an account: it makes it much easier for them to collect that data.

Since we made Yorba to help undo all of that, it would be kinda dumb for us to turn around and do it ourselves.

There isn’t one. To unlock Yorba’s most powerful features, we charge a small fee. Does that count?

Our radical business model is to make something that’s useful enough to pay for. Over time, our growth plan is to add more features and gather more users – not add more ways to exploit our existing users.

Yes, we do. In order to find and aggregate all of your far-flung online accounts, we need your permission to connect to the email addresses and payment methods that you used to create those accounts. For more information, visit our Data Security page.

There are also other methods we employ to find your accounts that don’t require access to any of your data, but naturally they’re not as comprehensive.

We will always communicate, in straightforward terms, exactly what access we need, why we need it, and what we’re doing with it. We’ll never access your personal info without your explicit consent: you can pick and choose which things you’ll grant Yorba permission to do. It’s not an ‘all or nothing’ situation.

For even more details, check out our Privacy Policy. We’ve tried to make it an easy read.

TECHNICAL ANSWER: we define “Account” to mean any online entity with whom you have an enduring online relationship (whether that be a user profile you log in to, recurring subscription fee you pay, or automated mailing list that sends you emails). That entity might be a business, an organization, a school, a government agency – essentially, any digital service that uses some sort of CRM and has you in their system.

SHORTER ANSWER: any organization that has you on a list. If they have you on a list, we’ll put them on your list.

“Digital Footprint” is a term referring to all of the activities, data, interactions, and/or relationships across the internet that can be associated with your unique identity. In essence, it’s the sum total of everything you do and have done online.

The larger your digital footprint, the less privacy you have.

The larger your digital footprint, the more inroads and potentially vulnerabilities there are for bad actors online to compromise your security.

The larger your digital footprint, the less control you have over how and where your personal information appears on the internet.

The big-picture goal of Yorba is to help you make your digital footprint as small as possible.

A few different ways.

First and foremost, we employ Mozilla’s lean data practices and minimize the amount of things we even need to keep safe. Collecting and storing data is not free, and protecting it is not simple. Since we have no desire to directly profit from your data, we have every incentive to keep it off our servers. We keep only what we 100% must have in order to provide you with our services (like finding all of your accounts), and remove it as soon as possible.

Second, we utilize local and/or federated storage wherever possible: basically, whenever we do need to collect your data, we aim for that data to be either be stored on your own personal cloud or, in the case of federated storage, on a storage ‘pod’ to which you control access. Thus Yorba only actually ‘has’ the data while you’re actively using Yorba, and ceases to ‘have’ it when you close out the tab. Moving forward, this ‘pod’ setup will also make it easier for you to take the data you’ve organized via Yorba and move it or use it elsewhere whenever you feel like it. Look into it! Federated storage is cool.

Third, we do all the classic and essential things like implementing 2FA and maintaining rigorous internal security protocols. Meat and potatoes stuff. To oversimplify things: we keep your data safe by not even having it. In the words of Mr. Miyagi, “the best block is no be there.”

When you link your credit card or bank account to Yorba, we’ll show you all the recurring charges linked to them. This way, you can easily see which accounts have subscription fees. This information is private and secure: it will be used only for this specific purpose and will never be shared.

To carry out this search, we use Plaid: a secure, encrypted service used by over 12,000 financial institutions for web integrations with apps like Venmo and Chime. Yorba does not access your actual credit cards, bank account numbers, etc. – only your payment history, and only for this very specific purpose. No other info will be stored, shared, sold, analyzed, or otherwise messed around with in any way.

Well, our feelings will be hurt.

But per the answer to the Frequently A’d Q above: there would not be much for them to take. It would be kinda like breaking into an empty vault.

Obviously, it’s still something we are very keen to avoid, and we have installed various failsafes that allow us to quickly detect and contain any intrusion. Explaining them here in great detail would be kinda counterproductive, as you might imagine.

We have a whole section about that!

But if you’re still not convinced – bear in mind, that we needed to balance being thorough with keeping the information clear and accessible – just contact us and ask us about your doubts. An actual human will get back to you.

Yorba is self-funded by the small team who created it – primarily, folks from Ruca, a creative co-op. We have not taken a cent from VC’s or other outside investors. We’re obviously trying to make money in the long run, but funding it ourselves lets us avoid external pressure to shortcut our ethics to do so.

We considered adding an “Our Team” page, but to be honest we didn’t think anyone would care. You can check out our LinkedIn if you’d like to put names and faces to the company.

We offer a free version of Yorba. It gives you all the tools and info you need to find and monitor your online accounts, but omits some of the more powerful tools we’ve built to help you save time cleaning up your digital footprint.

Yorba Premium is $72 per year (which is only $6 per month).

According to showrunner Carlton Cuse, the young actor who played Walt experienced a major growth spurt as he entered his teenage years, and it became too difficult to retain the character and explain how he got like 6 inches taller during what was, in-show, only supposed to be a few months on the island.

In theory? Maybe, if you’re very determined and have a lot of time to spare.

If you have, manually and by yourself, managed to find all of your accounts, read all of their terms of service and privacy policies, delete all of the ones you don’t use or don’t trust, and unsubscribe from all of the mailing lists you don’t read, please contact us (so that we can offer you a job).