Data policies designed for humans

Problem

Data privacy policies are largely inaccessible to consumers. The average policy is written at a college reading level and buried behind legal jargon that no one reads. At the same time, new regulations like CCPA and GDPR introduced a real cost and compliance burden — estimated at $50K–$450K annually — that most small to medium sized businesses had no affordable way to meet. The result was a gap on both sides: consumers couldn’t understand how their data was used, and the businesses handling that data couldn’t afford the legal counsel or engineering effort to get compliant.

Research

Before building anything, we needed to understand how bad the problem actually was. I developed an automated pipeline — Python, JavaScript, and AppleScript — to scrape the data privacy policies of every Fortune 500 company and run each one through a reading accessibility analyzer. The output was a readability score and language-accessibility breakdown for each policy, cataloged and archived in a dataset that directly informed the product algorithms and grading systems we built later.

See the full experiment →

Company

I cofounded BEACON with Joe Toscano in 2018, a data privacy company focused on technology innovation at the intersection of policy, research, and human-centered design. Our objective was to help small-medium sized businesses make privacy protection a competitive advantage by delivering a high quality, user-friendly privacy management experience for their customers.

Notable:

• Advisors included Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower
• Board members included the Intuit Chief Legal Officer and the former NY Assistant Attorney General
• Established a partnership with Crownpeak to distribute an enterprise data privacy front-end framework through their platform marketplace

Product

Pulse Privacy was the flagship SaaS product built inside BEACON. Where the broader practice focused on policy strategy, audits, and the F500 research, Pulse Privacy was the software: a subscription tool that let a small business generate, manage, and publish its legal policies without a lawyer or developer.

What we built:

• A custom terms and policy generator that walked a business owner through their data collection, tracking, and third-party sharing practices and produced a plain-language legal policy
• A member dashboard for managing, updating, and downloading (as branded PDF) all of a business’s legal documents in one place
• An embeddable “Pulse Privacy Center” experience that businesses could drop into their own site or app to give their customers a readable summary of what data is collected and why
• An early consumer-facing consent framework, with granular toggles for what a customer agrees to share and for how long, designed to make consent something a person could actually understand instead of a wall of legal text
• A data policy grading database and system, informed by the Fortune 500 audit dataset

My role: Cofounder and product design/development lead. I led product strategy, UX, no-code/low-code systems architecture (Webflow front end, Airtable-backed data, Memberstack for accounts, Zapier for automation), and wrote the business plan and investor materials.

Target customer: Established small businesses and startups with at least $15M in annual revenue and/or handling 50,000+ users’ data — companies for whom the new cost of privacy compliance was a real, unbudgeted threat.

Tools: Webflow, Airtable, Memberstack, Zapier, Python, JavaScript

Outcomes

• Raised $225k in pre-seed funding
• Designed and built an MVP covering the full product loop: policy generator, member dashboard, and embeddable privacy center
• Built and validated a subscription pricing model (Starter/Business/Unlimited tiers) and a full go-to-market and financial plan
• Established a partnership with Crownpeak to distribute enterprise privacy framework through their platform marketplace
• Prototyped a next-generation consumer consent framework (granular, toggle-based data-sharing agreements) as the seed for Pulse Privacy v2
• Product and business plan materials were used to pursue an angel/SAFE funding round in 2020, targeting a $600K raise
• Cataloged and archived Fortune 500 privacy policy readability data, informing product algorithms and grading systems