Arcula - Treasure your Privacy

Each website you give your email address to keeps a list of your private data, which is sold to other websites, allowing them to access your private data. Now, don't you want to treasure your privacy?

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Inspiration

Each and every time you login to a new application, you use the same key identifiers like your e-mail address, your phone number and your payment details. This data is then pooled and sold/distributed between these apps, so this means that using these few keys like your email and phone number, these apps can not just identify you, but unlock your personality and preferences. The same happened to one of our teammates - just like millions of people on the web, he signed up on Facebook. He completed the registration process, and when he was greeted on the home screen, he was confused. Most of his personal interests and hobbies were reflected in various advertisements on the page. A notification then popped up, asking him to add a relative as his friend, even though he had never given the Facebook website access to his private contacts. This very creepy and very serious problem is what inspired us to make Arcula.

What it does

Arcula is a web app that allows you to create identities for different websites to prevent them from circulating data related to you. You can create different identities for different websites, and can add passwords to them. But how does it actually work?

First, you sign up on our website. Second, we send you an email for verification. You click on the verify button and are able to access the dashboard. You can then set the master password on our website. Of course, make sure it's strong and keep it safe :)

Users can create identities with the click of a button. We generate a random email address, and the user puts in the website URL. Next, to add a password to the identity, the user can just enter their master password along with their preferred password for the identity. They can then sign up on the website using these details, and bob's your uncle.

However, a ton of websites want you to verify your account, and that's exactly why the user can see the emails of an identity. Yep, you heard that right - no more fake Gmail accounts. Just go to the inbox tab and you'll be able to verify yourself for ANY website. You can even view the HTML in these mails, along with the attachments. You can even preview these attachments or download them in a single click.

How we built it

For ideating and designing the user flow and interface, we used Figma. We built the frontend using Next.js (React) and deployed it on Vercel. We built the server and the mail server using Express and SMTP and deployed it on Google Cloud, which is the backbone of our web app. We knew that we would need a document based database, so we chose MongoDB.

Challenges we ran into

The time limit. To create everything, the mail server, the backend and the frontend in just 36 hours was truly the hardest challenge of the whole hack, and you better bet that coffee was our solution. But we also had a few issues with the mail server when we were starting out, we didn't understand how we could code a safe and reliable SMTP server, but in the end, we figured it out. We also later on had some issues while rendering embedded HTML in our E mails, but we fixed all the bugs. 🙂

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a robust backend along with a fully functioning mail server. We're also proud of the fact that we were able to pull ourselves together and finish our web app in the time constraint.

What we learned

We learnt about deploying our server on google cloud, along with gaining plenty of experience in SCSS and React. We also now understand how crucial the design of an application is to it's functionality and user-friendliness.

What's next for Arcula

The last thing you'd expect is for us to ask you to remember all the passwords for your identities. That's why we will create the Arcula extension - an extension that AUTOFILLS your details on website in SECONDS. You load the extension, log in with your account credentials and see all of your identities in one place. The extension autofills your details and submits the login form on any website. You can also create identities while creating a new account on a platform in just a single click. Now, isn't that divine?

We are going to polish our website and extension in order to improve the user experience, while also thinking about other ways we can make Arcula more accessible, and the internet more secure.

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