Who runs Bighound, and what's the catch?
A small independent project, not a venture-funded company. There is no sales team, no growth target, and no investor expecting a return on your personal information.
The business model
Section titled “The business model”There isn’t much of one, on purpose. Bighound is free to members and funded by voluntary donations. See how Bighound is funded.
What we will never do:
- Sell or share your data. Not anonymised, not aggregated, not “with trusted partners”.
- Put removals behind a paywall. Every opt-out here is one you could file yourself for free, and we’ll always show you how.
- Take affiliate money from removal services. That’s the exact conflict we warn members about, and it wouldn’t stop being a conflict if we were the ones taking it.
- Advertise. Ad tech is a data broker with better PR.
Why invitation-only
Section titled “Why invitation-only”Partly capacity. Mostly because a privacy tool that grows as fast as possible eventually has to monetise, and the only asset it has is its members’ data. Staying small is what lets the answer above stay simple.
What we can see
Section titled “What we can see”Less than you’d think. Your record is encrypted per-account. We can’t browse members’ household files, and we can’t recover your account if you lose your authenticator and your recovery codes — that’s not a policy, it’s arithmetic.