kanary

Kanary | Full Stack Engineer | Remote (US) | Competitive Salary + Equity | Python / React

Kanary is a personal security platform that monitors the web to identify and reduce risk based on an individual's threat model. An executive has different exposure than a gamer, and our system classifies each person's risk across 55,000+ sources. We've been building since 2020, started in campaign security, data science, and government agencies, backed by Mozilla and Y Combinator. We have 200+ organizations on the platform and are fully funded by our customers.

Attackers have never had better tools. LLMs, social media, and search surface personal data in new ways. A few prompts can launch a deepfake and impersonation campaign. Risk sources appear and disappear across social platforms, telegram chats, and private data broker platforms. Kanary exists to play the cat and mouse game for people at the speed and scale of an agentic internet.

Kanary is a combination of software workflows (crawling, scraping, automation), AI (data classification, research, code generation), and people (analysts trained to support customers and escalate). This is dynamic system and requires an interest in adversarial programming.

We’re growing our team, and seeking a multifaceted engineer (2+ years experience). Our software stack is python, javascript, react, and for LLMs, we use Anthropic, OpenAI, and experiment with model fine tuning as needed. Experience with web scraping, data pipelines, or security tooling is required.

Email steven@kanary.com with something you've built and why it was hard.

Learn more here: https://www.kanary.com/join-the-team#senior-software-enginee...

"lets dive in"

Discord published their approach to age verification in wake of UK child safety laws. The k-ID platform they worked with seems to take a logical technical approach to minimize risks of sensitive data breach and keep age verification private to the user. Temporary ID verification, no further storage of documents, verification videos are stored on device, etc.

With Discord, age verification felt urgent because it's a social platform with known grooming and CSAM problems. With something like OpenAI, it's less clear why it matters in its current state where it's mostly single-player. But it becomes way more problematic as advertisers gain more power on the platform and influence users. OpenAI doesn't want to eval every advertiser for harmful content, so instead they/and the government fall back on age as the filter and where to draw the line.

Kanary | REMOTE (US, Seattle Hub) | Multiple Roles

We’re building the fastest way to fight doxxing and digital stalking. Kanary automates data removal requests, fixes social media settings, and prioritizes expert recommendations. All from the privacy of your device.

Join our team of 8, backed by top VCs and now funded by our customers.

Open roles: Product Engineer, Android Developer, Product Design Lead, Product Manager

Details & contact: https://www.kanary.com/join-the-team

Kanary | REMOTE (US, Seattle Hub) | Product Engineer | Full Time

We’re building the fastest way to fight doxxing and digital stalking. Kanary automates data removal requests, fixes social media settings, and sorts through expert recommendations for what’s relevant. All from the privacy of your device.

Join our team of 5, backed by YC, 2048.vc, and Mozilla, and now funded by our customers.

Details: https://www.kanary.com/join-the-team Technologies: iOS, Python/Django, React/Typescript, AWS

Kanary | REMOTE (US, Seattle Hub) | Product Engineer | Full Time

We’re building the fastest way to fight doxxing and digital stalking.

Kanary automates data removal requests, fixes social media settings, and sorts through expert recommendations for what’s relevant. All from the privacy of your device.

Join our team of 6, backed by YC, 2048.vc, and Mozilla, and now funded by our customers.

Details: https://www.kanary.com/join-the-team Technologies: iOS, Python/Django, React/Typescript, AWS

Kanary | Remote (US) | Product Engineer | Full Time

We’re building the fastest way to fight doxxing and digital stalking.

You’ll help scale our newest product, Kanary Copilot. Copilot automates data removal requests, fixes social media settings, and sorts through expert recommendations for what’s relevant. All from the privacy of your device.

Join our team of 6, backed by YC, 2048.vc, and Mozilla, and now funded by our customers.

Details: https://www.kanary.com/join-the-team Technologies: iOS, Python/Django, React/Typescript, AWS Contact: rachel[at]kanary[dot]com (I’m the founder) Add “HN” in the subject.

The bankruptcy is because they have to buy everyone credit monitoring post-breach. And they cannot afford to do that because this is a grifter business impacting impacted millions of people. Funny thing is everyone already has credit monitoring but it's now the financial squeeze shutting down these harmful businesses.

How about we take a few folks from the USDS put them on a project to audit any business selling personal data without opt in from individuals, and proactively require them to prove funds to cover monitoring for everyone in their databases in case of breach? If they can't cover, they can't operate. Or at the very least the government could put them on a watch list to warn other businesses not to purchase data from them because risk is high / quality is poor.

At the very least, this would shut down the long tail of small data grifters, maybe even force the bigger brokers to re-evaluate their business model.

Kanary | Remote (US or Canada) | Product Engineer | Full Time

We’re building the fastest way to fight doxxing, digital stalking, and deepfakes.

As the first Product Engineer, you’ll help launch and scale our mobile app, Kanary Copilot. Copilot automates data removal requests, fixes social media settings, monitors for risks, and sorts through thousands of expert recommendations for what’s relevant. All from the privacy of your device.

Join our team of 6, proudly backed by YC, 2048.vc, and Mozilla, and now funded by our customers.

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

We use iOS (Swift UI), Python/Django, React/Typescript, and AWS.

Email me rachel[at]kanary[dot]com (I’m the founder).

Add “HN” in the subject for a faster response.

Kanary | iOS/Swift Developer | Remote | Contract

We’re an early stage consumer security startup launching an iOS app.

You’ll work with a technical team who built a web app loved by thousands of members, raised venture capital, and grew to profitability.

Reach out if you’re passionate about online safety, enjoy optimizing UX, have launched consumer iOS apps, and know what it takes to be successful with metrics like app store rankings.

Learn more https://www.notion.so/kanary/iOS-Developer-at-Kanary-Contrac...

Contact rachel [at] kanary [dot] com

Kanary | Seattle, WA | Onsite or remote (US-Only) | Senior full-stack or backend engineer | Contract or full-time | Python, JS, Go

Help people protect their safety and privacy. Build automations and train LLMs to respond to threats and proactively secure personal information online.

We are…

* Scaling up in response to the increasing number of doxxing and harassment incidents on and off social media platforms.

* A team of 5. We have a culture of radical ownership, zoom show & tells, and quarterly in-person off-sites.

* Building new products so that Kanary is fully automated and right at your finger tips.

* Profitable and growing fast. Proud to be backed by YC and 2048.vc, and now funded by our customers.

Details: https://www.kanary.com/join-the-team#full-stack-software-eng...

Contact me: rachel[at]kanary[dot]com (I’m the founder)

P.S. I’d love to hear from designers, front end devs, and marketers who are passionate about our mission. If that’s you or someone you admire, reach out.

I'm the founder of Kanary. We received a grant from YC in 2018, and have been growing our privacy service since then.

I see a few of our members commented on this post already, so I'll let them speak to the trustworthiness / impact of our work.

You can also read up on us on reddit r/kanary or r/privacy where myself and the team post updates. Reviews like PC Mag are fine, but that one is almost a year old and includes the bias of the reviewer - if you're on hackernews, you know how much software can change in a year.

Kanary is a grant recipient from YC and does data deletion as well. Main difference from Optery is simplicity of the tiers (there is only 1 premium tier that covers all sites + hands on support). While Optery's b2b tooling is more built out than ours.

We have a 'downgrade to a free tier' option if you are paying and want to take a break from the service. We delete all data if you decide to cancel, but you can join back any time. If it's not clear from the username, I'm on the team.

Any 3rd party service or individual doing opt outs should limit data sharing as much as possible. Steps to do that include setting up email aliases, searching data in separate queries, using a proxy or VPN, verifying data exists before sending a data deletion request with all your pii in it, pushing back on any invasive requirement for govt ID...

It's tempting to just automate sending a mass email to all the brokers with your full name, DOB, and address asking for deletion (some services actually do this - beware), but that exposes you to a bunch of new spam.

I've been building Kanary for 4+ years (we're a removal service & YC grant recipient) and we take a conservative approach to each site. I wrote a bit more about why this matters: https://www.kanary.com/blog/dont-get-spammed

Yael's resource is amazing. Highly recommend this open source guide. Also check out Michael Bazzell's how to disappear guides: https://inteltechniques.com/links.html

Discover's service is limited to only a few sites (which is why it's free). And it is not transparent about progress of removals or requirements.

That might not be the most effective way to reduce spam or reduce targeted attacks, because it ignores many hard to remove exposures.

We have a similar price point at Kanary (I'm the founder) and it covers the resources we invest in the cat & mouse game required to escalate and complete removals on a wide variety of sites, not just a handful of easy ones.

Many employers do - we work with plenty of teams and even have specific guidance for how members can ask their HR or Security lead to sponsor a membership.

(some basic info here: https://www.kanary.com/enterprise)

addy is great - we've worked with them a bit on our alias backend

Kanary lets you add family members at a 50% discount. Toggle up or down member #s to see pricing on our sign up page: https://www.kanary.com/#sign-up

And as Kanary scans, we suggest members that match your information too to make them easy to add (and these notifications are easily dismissable).

Glad to hear it. All we do at Kanary is focus on exposure clean up. We've spent 4+ years refining how we find and match information to show accurate results vs a bunch of mismatched / irrelevant alerts.

We run a free trial & free version too so that it can be accessible for folks who want to run this type of clean up, have the time to DIY, and don't want to pay.

Kanary members have our full support for all types of exposures, not just data brokers. To build a broader service, we rely on automation and human assistance. Mozilla is using OneRep to power this service, so comparing Mozilla to Kanary at this stage is comparing OneRep to Kanary. Here are a few considerations: https://www.kanary.com/blog/best-removal-service-onerep-kana...

We have a free trial that auto-downgrades into our free tier. We encourage everyone to compare services before joining. https://www.kanary.com/#sign-up

Agreed - why don't they focus on enforcement or open up small claims?

It seems so obviously the best way to use government funds in a way only government can. What is preventing them from passing changes that make more aggressive enforcement possible?

This plan sounds like a billion dollars will go to a consulting firm to try to build a system that does a magic 1-click opt out. But it will be extremely difficult to accommodate all the edge cases that come with integrating 500+ varying sources of varying levels of quality of personal data. The legal system alone has the power to change enforcement, any thoughts on why they aren't focusing there?

The best services will cover removals across more sources than just data brokers. They are in the category of "Authorized Agents".

Take a look at https://www.kanary.com too - yc grant awardee in 2018.

These services are great and the best ones will cover removals across more sources than just data brokers. They are in the category of "Authorized Agents".

Take a look at https://www.kanary.com too - yc grant awardee in 2018.

Kanary | Backend Engineering Lead | Seattle, Remote (US or Canada) PST Preferred | Comp Estimate: $150k base + 3% Equity

We’re using large scale browser automation and LLMs to scrub your private info (home address, phone number, emails) off the public internet.

We’re a team of 5, backed by top pre-seed VCs like YC and 2048 and privacy leaders like Mozilla. 2 years since our first raise, we’re funded by our customers.

Titles at our stage don’t matter much. We’re looking for a strong engineer to help grow the product and the team as we respond to rapid customer growth. The most challenging work at Kanary is backend development. You’ll own projects like:

- 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. We use python and django on our backend. - minimize QA time and code repetition by working with generative models and extending our templating language using Go.

Compensation depends on 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.

Please format your subject with “HN” in the title for a faster response :)

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

Thanks for sharing the feedback for folks here. Yes, we are looking for people who will thrive in an early startup. We're currently 5 people full time.

Why thank you!

good feedback ty - we'd like to test a lower cost tier. This is very helpful and common feedback from folks who don't need as intense support as our earliest adopters.

Thanks! Their removal process is awful and requires 'email verification' even though half their info on you is often incorrect. Who have them the right to 'verify' us... anyway...

To get past this, create a burner email (gmail or duckduckgo or mozilla or hey or icloud) that looks at least a little bit human, send a very angry sounding email to privacy@intelius.com and cc privacy@peopleconnect.us (the company that owns intelius, zabasearch, uspeoplesearch... and a few other spam sites).

Tell them you tried to use their form and it's broken and not showing correct info. You may need to verify your bday or past addresses in an email exchange, but once you do this with 2 or 3 emails, they'll suppress your info from public search. DO NOT send them government ID, even if they ask for it, insist you've already provided enough verification.

Include if you're a Californian / Colorado / EU / Iowa / Utah / Connecticut resident, or if you've had any harassment / stalking issues in the past. (this context provides you with legal leverage if they don't comply with your request - so including it helps you get a faster response)

If they give you anymore trouble beyond that, reach out to our team hello [at] kanary.com. We'll help you escalate the issue.