Tool Overview:
Ethyca

About Ethyca

Ethyca develops privacy management tools for engineering and legal teams, with their flagship product Fides serving as an open-source platform for privacy rights automation. The platform integrates privacy controls directly into development workflows, enabling teams to handle data privacy requirements programmatically rather than through manual processes.

What does Ethyca do?

Fides provides infrastructure for discovering, classifying, and managing personal data across an organization's technology stack. The platform automatically detects and maps data across cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as identity providers such as Okta and Google SSO. For data subject access requests (DSARs), Fides automates the process of identifying user data across systems and orchestrating access or deletion requests, reducing the typical processing time from 83 hours to approximately 17 seconds.

The platform includes tools for both first-party and third-party consent management. Organizations can create customized preference centers for managing consent across websites and mobile apps, while also detecting and managing third-party systems such as cookies and pixels. The system automatically categorizes these elements using Ethyca's privacy intelligence platform and can generate customized cookie banners based on geographic location and specific regulations.

What makes Ethyca different?

A key differentiator is Ethyca's 'Privacy as Code' approach, which brings privacy controls directly into the software development lifecycle. Engineers can describe privacy characteristics and enforce privacy rules in code, enabling automated privacy checks during continuous integration. This allows legal and engineering teams to collaborate on privacy policies that can be automatically enforced during development.

Unlike cloud-hosted privacy solutions, Fides operates on-premise within an organization's infrastructure, eliminating the need for data egress to third-party providers. The platform is open source, with the software licensed under Apache 2.0 and its privacy language under Creative Commons BY 4.0, making it accessible to any organization looking to implement privacy controls.

Use cases and industries

Fides supports deployment of privacy compliance requirements for regulations including CCPA, GDPR, LGPD, and the EU AI Act. The platform includes pre-built integrations for common data platforms like MongoDB, Snowflake, and Redshift, as well as popular SaaS vendors. Organizations can use the platform to generate GDPR Article 30-compliant data maps and automate privacy rights fulfillment across their infrastructure.

The platform's low-code integration builder leverages the n8n automation tool, allowing teams to create custom workflows and integrations. This enables organizations to implement specific privacy requirements based on their industry, jurisdiction, or internal policies. When processing privacy requests, teams can customize rules and policies to ensure automated processes align with business requirements while maintaining compliance with relevant regulations.