Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This startup is developing a better way for companies to manage your personal data.

Bret Waters
2 min readJul 4, 2022

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Did you know that you can ask Amazon to give you all the personal data they have associated with your account? What they will give you is a bunch of geeky JSON files that will make your head hurt, but you’ll be amazed at how much they know about you.

The reason Amazon makes this available is that they are required to under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), one of the most convoluted sets of regulations known to mankind. There’s a section of the GDPR regulations called “Data Portability” which requires online companies to make it possible for you to download your data from one provider and upload it to another. And so Amazon is required to make that possible, even though there is no actual use case for moving your data from Amazon to another company.

A new Silicon Valley startup, DaXlens, has developed a whole new approach to managing personal data in a way that is better for companies and protects consumers. With the DaXlens technology platform, companies reduce their risk of data breeches or fines for regulatory noncompliance, and consumers gain the benefits of controlling their own personal data.

What companies mostly care about, of course, is being able to market to customers. If you bought a book in the past, they want to be able to email you when a new book by that same author comes out. With the DaXlens platform, they can still do that but without any of the security risk or regulatory overhead associated with keeping your personal data on their servers.

What consumers care about, of course, is seamless shopping experiences and not suddenly finding out that their social security number is being sold on the “dark web”.

The DaXlens platform takes care of both of these things, making companies and consumers safer and happier.

The fact is, we need entire new paradigms for online security and data tracking. The notion of web “cookies” was a quick patch that a guy at Netscape hacked together 28 years ago, never expecting we’d still be using his crappy hack a generation later. DaXlens is developing new technology and a whole new future, making online security easier for companies and more secure for consumers.

DaXlens will be presenting at Demo Day for the 4thly Startup Accelerator on July 7th.

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Bret Waters

Silicon Valley guy. Teaches at Stanford. Eats fish tacos.