Ethyca announces end-to-end privacy rights fulfillment for free

Ethyca, the New York-based developer-centric privacy engineering platform, announced that for the first time it will make end-to-end automated privacy rights fulfilment available free to all, with support for owned and third-party infrastructure, by making it a core component of its open-source Fides tools.

Adding subject rights automation to the Fides platform removes what has been historically a costly, complex, and labour intensive process for businesses, and demonstrates the value unlocked by a true privacy-as-code approach. The company is taking this step to focus privacy engineering on what matters: not just checkbox legal compliance, but technology systems that truly respect human users.

Ethyca

Ethyca, who work with the likes of InVision, and IDEO and whose investors include Lee Fixel, IA Ventures, Lachy Groom, Des Traynor (Intercom), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) and Table Management (Bill Ackman), took the first step at the end of last year towards making Privacy-as-Code possible for any business with the release of its Fides open-source privacy engineering platform. The latest releases, Fidesops 1.4 and Fidesctl 1.5 enable new privacy engineering capabilities for eng teams, making it easier than ever before to have end-to-end data privacy compliance for free.

In conjunction with this new approach to making privacy compliance more accessible, Ethyca has also released data from a survey it carried out with over 300 software developers at companies ranging in size, from startups to enterprises with over 1000 employees.

Data Privacy

The results found that almost half (48.5%) of the respondents’ companies are spending at least $1.2 million a year on data privacy platforms. Historically, companies have relied on a host of expensive SaaS products that have over-promised and under-delivered; Fides represents a democratization of user data privacy rights management that benefits everyone. With these new capabilities, any engineering team can easily set up a Fides instance and build on top of it to customize according to business and compliance needs.

“Like many in our community, we at Ethyca believe privacy is a basic human right and making the ability to deliver on those rights a free, default feature of every tech stack is vital to building trust in the internet,” says Cillian Kieran, Founder and CEO of Ethyca.

“The problem of basic rights fulfilment can be solved with developer tools – it should not cost businesses six figures per month to honour user requests to access or erase their data. Such high fees mean legacy privacy compliance solutions can never truly deliver on their claims that ‘privacy rights are human rights. We’re excited to take the next step in our strategic ten-year vision to redefine Privacy-as-Code. This is a vital step to push our industry to focus on what matters: not just checkbox legal compliance, but technology systems that truly respect human users.”

Ethyca’s latest research also revealed that 55% of developers said that they would use a data privacy solution to help them streamline their daily workflows, highlighting the time-consuming process that those on the front line face, making it difficult to solve even the basic technical challenges of privacy at scale. The survey found that 85% of software engineers polled believe privacy should be proactively considered as part of systems design.

Ethyca’s Privacy-as-Code approach imbues systems with a layer of easily-governable privacy metadata such that basics like data mapping and rights to access and erasure require minimal effort to facilitate on an ongoing basis. Privacy-as-Code allows frontline software engineers and legal teams to tackle data governance holistically, and powerfully, together.

Fidesops 1.4 and Fidectl 1.5, free and open-source tools, will be publicly available from April 12, with more open-source tools in development that will be released in the coming months.