This architect quit his job to make an app that gives you back control of social media by Matt Weinberger on Feb 2, 2016, 12:22 PM Advertisement
 In 2014, not long after finishing his Masters of Architecture from Columbia, New York-based architect Aldo Cherdabayev quit his job and moved to Dublin, Ireland, to start a company. He wanted to build app called that gives you back control of the stuff you post on social media. Think of Shryne like a locker to store all of your social media posts, likes, pictures, texts, emails, and whatever else — taking control of that content away from the likes of ad-driven giants like Facebook and Google, and giving it back to you. "It seemed improbable to me that something like this didn't exist," Cherdabayev says. How it works Shryne takes the form of an app for iPhone, the Mac, and the web. It has a definite learning curve to use, even after a big usability update that hit last week. But that's because there's some power under the hood. First, plug in your credentials for services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Then — and this is the interesting part — you choose the people with whom you want to archive your interactions. From there, you get a timeline view of your history with that person, in chronological order, letting you relive an entire interaction with somebody. Texts, e-mails, pictures, Instagram posts, all get combined, putting your whole history in front of you, using your own data to reconstruct your past. Instead of viewing by year or by place, Shryne asks you to view your stuff by person. You can even run analytics on your Shryne account to see who you talked to, how, and when. And if you decide to delete your Facebook or your Twitter, at least your important memories will live on separately, in a private, non-ad-driven space. "It's a bigger-picture view of our data culture," Cherdabayev says. To get the obvious question out of the way, Shryne could be used to creepily obsess over an ex. But Cherdabayev sees it more as giving you the option to safely store any kind of history you feel is worth saving. He notes that Facebook and its ilk all make money by taking your stuff and serving you ads, while you don't get paid at all. It results in a funny situation, Cherdabayev says, where your most important photos and texts just become another node on a Facebook revenue chart. "The people who care the least are the people earning the most from it," Cherdabayev says. Rather than advertising, Shryne uses a subscription model: With the free Shryne plan, you can store 250MB of data among 5 people-based archives. That's fine if you're mostly storing text messages and emails. But if you have a lot of pictures or video, you might want to opt for one of the subscription plans: $9.99/month gets you 5GB of data and unlimited archives. For $19.99, it goes up to 20GB. 
Going to Dublin, going forward The Dublin move was important, Cherdabayev says, because it takes the data away from the United States into the jurisdiction of the European Union's much more strict data privacy laws. It means that your most secret data has a better chance of staying secret. 
Going forward, Cherdabayev acknowledges that there's still a lot to do. First, Shryne doesn't support storing certain kinds of data, including Facebook Messenger and Apple iMessage, because of restrictions some companies place on what can be accessed. That's something Shryne is working on figuring out. Second, there's a big challenge ahead in actually helping users make sense of the huge amounts of data the app collects — as of 2014, Shryne had archived a trillion text messages, and that number is growing rapidly. But the promise is even more control for users as they get new ways to sort their stuff. "The challenge here is to seek a new experience sorting that data," Cherdabayev says.
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