The art of digital decluttering

East Kildonan

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2024 (365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We’re paying more attention to our growing amount of ‘stuff‘. As we seek to declutter our lives, perhaps we give items to charities or put them in storage.

There is a growing focus on cleaning up our digital lives, too. That process brings many benefits, including saving money and improved online security.

I recently spoke with Chris Zeunstrom, the founder and CEO of Yorba, a platform that helps people declutter their digital lives. Yorba offers a free monthly service that scans two years of emails to identify the different sites a user logs into, which accounts have been compromised in data breaches, and the email lists they’re on. A premium account, which costs $6 per month, connects to bank accounts so users can track accounts they subscribe to and organize regular expenses, from mortgages to subscriptions. Users can cancel services they no longer want.

“We’re finding anything that you have a relationship with online; things you log into, send you email, you spend money on, or data breaches that old accounts are involved in,” Zeunstrom said. “We help you clean those up.”

Those little subscriptions add up. While average Canadians believe they spend $86 per month on subscriptions, they actually shell out $219. Three in 10 underestimate their monthly spend by as much as $200. The average Canadian thinks they have four monthly subscriptions when they actually have eight.

That means many of us are paying for things we don’t use or wouldn’t miss. Perhaps we’re now paying for a long-forgotten free trial.

Consumers need help because companies use effective “dark patterns” to keep us spending money. They complicate cancellation processes, so we give up, or they hide them so we don’t even begin. Sometimes the process forces us to an actual person whose job is to convince us to stay with various inducements.

Other tactics include not telling people when their renewal dats are, charging them, and then not providing refunds after the fact. That’s why auto-renewals are popular. Companies hope we’ll forget.

Another growing problem is consumers paying twice for the same service. They subscribe to a bundle of television channels, not knowing which ones are included. Later on, they subscribe to another channel, unaware they’re already paying for it.

Hands up if you get emails from places you never visited or engaged with. This can start by simply making a restaurant reservation. The email address is placed in a holding company database, which is duplicated multiple times for multiple companies. Unsubscribing from one of them doesn’t cancel the others. Companies often create multiple email databases that send out messages like daily newsletters. Cancelling Tuesday’s may not cancel Wednesday’s.

“If you read the fine print, they can do whatever they want with it,” Zeunstrom said. “Yorba’s value proposition is if you’re on a list at an organization, we aggregate that to show you all the things that you’re on out there to help you start to remove those.”

Beware of those old accounts you no longer use as well those which remain active. Changes in privacy policies mean many companies now use your data to train their algorithms.

“The account… doesn’t die off,” Zeunstrom said. “The data in there is being used to train algorithms and AI and resell things to you.”

To learn more visit yorba.co