One year after its first release jumbo has two important news to announce. First, the company released A comprehensive update of the app that protects your privacy with online services. Second, the company has completed a $ 8 million Series A round of financing.
If you are not familiar with Jumbo, the app wants to fix the problems associated with online privacy today. Complicated terms of use combined with hostile default settings have made it really difficult to understand what personal information is out there. Due to the recent regulatory changes, it is now possible to change the privacy settings for many services.
While it is possibleThat doesn’t mean it is easy. If you’ve tried adjusting your privacy settings on Facebook or LinkedIn, you know that it’s a complicated process with lots of submenus and non-descriptive text.
Likewise, social networks have been around for more than a decade. While you enjoyed sharing photos and public messages with a small group of friends ten years ago, you may not want to share this content with hundreds or even thousands of “friends” today.
The result is a iPhone and Android App with which you are responsible for your privacy. It is essentially a dashboard that you can use to control your privacy on the web. You first connect the app to various online services and can then control them via Jumbo. Jumbo is not limited to what you can do with APIs, as it can mimic Javascript calls to web pages that the APIs cannot access.
For example, if you connect your Facebook account, you can remove your profile from advertising lists, delete previous searches, change the visibility of posts where you are tagged, and much more. With Google, you can clear your history across multiple services – web search, Chrome history, YouTube search, Google map activity, location history, etc.
Basically, Jumbo questions the fact that everything should stay online forever. Conversations you made six months ago may not be relevant today. Why can’t you delete these conversations?
With Jumbo you can delete and archive old tweets, messenger conversations and old Facebook posts. The app can scan your accounts regularly and delete anything that is older than a certain threshold – it can be a month, a year or whatever you want.
While your friends can no longer see this content, Jumbo archives everything in a tab called Vault.
With today’s update, everything has been refined. The main tab has been redesigned to let you know what Jumbo has done in the past week. The company now uses background notifications to perform some tasks even if you don’t start the app every day.
Monitoring of data breaches has been improved. Jumbo is now using SpyCloud to tell you exactly what has leaked in the event of a data breach – your phone number, your email address, your password, your address, etc.
With simple buttons and recommendations that you can accept or ignore, it’s also much easier to understand the settings that you can change for each service.
A clear business model
The basic features of Jumbo are free, but you need to purchase a subscription to access the most advanced features. With Jumbo Plus, you can scan and archive your Instagram account, delete your Alexa voice recordings, manage your Reddit and Dropbox accounts, and track more than one email address for data breaches.
With Jumbo Pro, you can manage your LinkedIn account (and you know that LinkedIn’s privacy settings are a mess). You can also use the data breach feature to track more information – your ID, credit card number, and social security number. You can also use it to activate a tracker blocker.
This new feature in the second version of Jumbo replaces your phone’s default DNS settings. All DNS requests are forwarded to your phone via a network profile managed by Jumbo. If you try to access a tracker, the request is blocked. If you try to access legitimate content, the request will go through. It works in the browser and in native apps.
You can pay for what you want for Jumbo Plus, from $ 3 a month to $ 8 a month. You can also choose between $ 9 a month and $ 15 a month what you want to pay for Jumbo Pro.
You might think that you are giving a lot of personal information to a small startup. Jumbo is aware of this and tries to reassure its user base with radical design decisions, transparency and a clear business model.
Jumbo does not want to dismantle your data. Your archived data will not be saved on the Jumbo servers. It stays on your phone and optionally on your iCloud or Dropbox account as a backup.
Jumbo doesn’t even have user accounts. When you open the app for the first time, the app assigns you a unique ID to send you push notifications. The company also hired security review companies.
“We don’t store email addresses, so we don’t know why subscribers sign up,” said Pierre Valade, CEO of Jumbo.
Profitable until 2022
Jumbo has completed a $ 8 million financing round. The company had previously completed a $ 3.5 million starting round. This time Balderton Capital leads the round. The company had already invested in Valade’s previous startup, Sunrise.
Many business angels also participated in the round and Jumbo lists them all on his website. The point here is to be transparent again.
Interestingly, Jumbo doesn’t rely on explosive growth and eyeballs. The company claims to have sufficient funds available by February 2022. In the meantime, the startup hopes to win 100,000 subscribers for profitability.
