Listen to this articleAbine, Inc. is the online privacy company. Their mission is to bring easy-to-use online privacy tools and services to everyone who wants them. Since the ways that companies collect, share and sell personally identifiable information are constantly changing, they strongly believe that online privacy solutions must continue to improve and evolve to address these challenges. To find out more about their solutions we sat down with Andrew Sudbury, Co-founder and CTO of Abine, Inc:
Q: Andrew, could you tell us something more about the company?
A: Abine was founded in 2009 by MIT engineers and financial experts who recognized that it’s become extremely difficult to navigate online privacy in an interconnected and digital world.
We believe that people should get to choose when to share their personal information. We believe that people care deeply about their privacy and have a right to protect it. We believe technology solutions that improve online privacy should be accessible to everyone. We believe that the web is better when you have more control over your personal data.
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Q: You’ve recently received broad patent for privacy and identity protection; could you tell us something more?
A: Our unique technology tokenizes consumers’ personal data in an encrypted form that provides truly proactive and secure online privacy and identity protection for the most frequent things that people do in their digital lives, like tracking protection, identity protection for creating anonymous accounts, passwords and phone numbers when signing up for new accounts or apps online, and credit card data breach protection by using Blur Masked Cards for a secure e-commerce experience.
The term “tokenization” is used to refer to the process of replacing sensitive data (e.g. credit card numbers) with a non-sensitive counterpart, which is what’s called a “token”. The token essentially acts as an identifier to map back to the sensitive data via the tokenization system. This way you can transact without having to expose your sensitive data.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your solutions?
A: Our flagship product, Blur, is an extremely secure password manager at its core, that provides robust online privacy tools. Blur has a variety of unique online privacy features. In addition to password management, Blur blocks third-party trackers online, while also giving Blur users the ability to “Mask” their identity online, letting users choose where they want to give out their real email addresses, phone number or credit card information and where they want to use automatically generated tokens for their credentials. These Masked Credentials are still “real” – emails go to your inbox, you can receive phone calls, and you can make purchases. But the control over your personal information has flipped from the website, back to you. If your information is ever used, abused, lost or stolen, you can turn off the Masked Credentials you gave to a particular website without impacting the rest of your online life.
Blur is available for both desktop, as well as iOS and Android devices.
Our DeleteMe service is a hands-free subscription service that removes your personal information from the web. Online marketers are constantly gathering data about their target audiences, building profiles about individuals and selling these profiles to other marketers. DeleteMe removes personal information of individuals and families like names, current and former addresses, phone numbers and birthdate from the largest data broker and people search websites online.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: As we continue to adapt and evolve our solutions to prepare for the ever-changing landscape of online privacy, our plans revolve heavily around bringing a higher level of online privacy to mobile device users. While most privacy and security solutions are currently focused on protecting desktop browsing, it’s abundantly clear that the world is going mobile. As more and more web traffic moves to mobile devices, our solutions will continue to adapt to the increasing privacy concerns in the digitally connected world.
Q: What are the main challenges of developing online privacy solutions right now?
A: The biggest challenge within our industry is the fact that it’s still essentially brand new. All parties within the industry are blazing a trail while adjusting to the world around them. As privacy concerns continue to move into the mainstream, the companies within the online privacy sphere must continue to improve their solutions to keep up with new regulations and privacy laws.
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