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Comment · 6 months ago
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 [email protected] with something you've built and why it was hard.

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

Comment · 1 year ago
"lets dive in"
Comment · 1 year ago
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.

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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.

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Comment · 2 years ago
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.

Comment · 2 years ago
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.

Comment · 2 years ago

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