Celebrating our launch: welcome!

Hi, I’m Tom.

I wanted to write a brief blog post to say firstly, welcome!

Secondly, to explain a little bit about why we started Rightly, how it works, and where we’re trying to get to. I’ll keep it short and (a bit) sweet.

Why we started Rightly

So, it’s 2017, and GDPR - the law that gave people significantly more rights over their data - was due to come in, and I thought it was brilliant. However, as time wore on, it became clear to me that the law wasn’t accessible for most people: who was going to contact each company individually? Worse still, many of us didn’t know which companies had our data, or how to find out.

That’s when the idea of Rightly came to mind. An online tool that gives you more control over your data and is simple and easy to use, no matter how familiar you are with data, GDPR or any of the buzzwords.

Since then, with the help of an innovative, enthusiastic and award-winning team, we’ve developed Rightly into what it is today. An evolving, secure tool that lets you manage your data from one place.

Our mission

Is simple. To give people more control over the data. This means helping you find out where it is, and to manage it easily. We’re going to keep building tools that make this easier.

We also know how important our community of like-minded individuals and businesses have been so far, and are keen to keep this growing. If you’d like to get in touch, please feel free! My email is at the bottom of this blog.

How it works

Ah, the important part. We’ve broken down the process into a few steps below for you. If anything is still unclear, tweet us or drop us a line!

1. Create your profile: Upload your ID, email, address and phone number easily.
2. Your profile is validated: We use an independent third party verification system for this, called TrustID. It’s the same one the government uses to verify identity documents, so you’re in good hands!
3. Choose your companies: Pick from our growing list of 1500 of the most popular companies to send requests to. If a company isn’t there that you wanted, get in touch and we’ll add it for you.
4. Send your requests: Easily ask for your data, to delete it, or to adjust your marketing preferences from multiple companies in just a few clicks.
5. Receive your data: This step takes a little longer. Companies must respond within 30 days, and most companies take around 2 weeks. We can’t do much about this delay at the moment, and are working with companies to reduce it.

We’ll also stay in touch via email, to update you on how your request is progressing, and to let you know when they’ve responded. You’ll also be able to see this in your account, but we know how busy life gets!

Why we’re proud of it

Because we’re making waves in the right direction. Rightly is free to use, and the basic service always will be. In short, we’re committed to being free because we believe that everyone should be able to access their data. To read more about this, see 'why we're free'.

We’ve also put a lot of thought into all the steps, and have done a lot of work behind the scenes! Our simplified and standardised process gives companies the minimum amount of information required to fully process your request, and hugely reduces the back and forth that often happens without it. Your data is yours, and should be easily retrievable.

On that note, we’ve made sure that we can’t see the data that companies send back to you, ever. This is central to our ethos of it being yours, and yours only. To read about our data ethics, check out our page.

We’re also actively finding alternatives to us storing the data for you. This is because we know some people would be more comfortable if this were possible. We’re making progress on this!

We’re always improving

We’re still in our beta phase, which means that we’re still improving our user experience. This can lead to a little frustration with the navigation, so please do bear with us!

Similarly, your data will come back as a mix of excel sheets, pdfs, and other formats, depending on the type of data and the company. This can sometimes be a little different to what people expect, although it is very informative. If you need any help with this feel free to send any questions or feedback our way.

As I mentioned, it’s only a fraction of what we want the whole thing to be, but this is just the beginning of our journey.

I’m thrilled you’re here to share it with us.

Tom

Founder of Rightly

tom@rightly.co.uk

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