Inspiration
When you sign up for a website, do you actually read the fine print, or do you blindly accept their terms and let them collect your data? Few people understand the true impact of these actions, so we wanted to help people not only understand it, but intuitively see what these companies could potentially know about their lives, visually in the form of a neighborhood.
What it does
Youville allows users to paste the Privacy Policy of any website. An LLM pipeline (Powered by Gemini) scans the privacy policy, examining clauses, to see what personal information that company could possibly collect.
All the different personal things the website can access (based on the privacy policy) are presented as your neighborhood. The more items/ people/ points of interest there are in your neighborhood, the more data you are agreeing to share with the company.
For example, if the company collects data about your school (where you go to school, etc.), then your neighborhood contains a school. If the company collects data about your workplace, an office building shows. If your social circle is collected, a few people will appear by the park.
How we built it
We built using a framework called Next.js since Next.js is basically a frontend and backend framework all-in-one. That means that the frontend and backend are in the same workspace, making development much easier (as AI workflows have access to all context: what the frontend expects, what the backend outputs, etc).
The most intriguing part of the project, in our opinion, was the neighborhood. This was hand designed using Figma. Once the neighborhood (and all the assets involved) were developed, we turned the neighborhood scene into a React component (compatible with Next.js).
Tech Stack
Frontend: Next.js (TypeScript) Backend: Next.js (TypeScript) AI Parsing: Google Gemini
Tools
Style
- Figma #### AI Agents:
- Codex
- Github Copilot
- Amazon Kiro
- Cursor
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we faced was building Youville with different levels of experience on our team. For one member, this was both his first hackathon and his first time working on a coding project of this scale. This meant balancing the work we needed to finish with time for a more experienced teammate to explain concepts, walk through problems, and help him contribute.
With limited time, finding that balance wasn’t always easy. Mentoring sometimes slowed down development, but it also pushed us to communicate more clearly and think through the decisions we were making. We wanted to build something we were proud of while making sure everyone had a meaningful role in creating it.
Working through that challenge became a valuable part of the experience. We learned from each other, and our less experienced teammate gained hands-on experience that would have been difficult to get from smaller projects alone.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of turning our idea for Youville into a project we built together. With a short deadline and different levels of coding experience, getting to this point took lots of patience, teamwork, and a willingness to learn as we went.
A particular accomplishment that stands out is how much our first-time hackathon participant grew throughout the project. He took on work at a scale he hadn’t experienced before, and helping him contribute made this feel like a shared accomplishment. For our more experienced teammates, explaining decisions and guiding someone through unfamiliar problems was its own challenge and opportunity to grow.
We’re also proud of how much room we gave ourselves to experiment creatively. With how capable AI has become, it served as a powerful tool in our workflow. We could spend much more time exploring ideas, tinkering with different approaches, and figuring out what would make our ideas unique. It helped us become more ambitious because the time needed to turn those ideas into something tangible was less of a limiting factor. Part of that accomplishment was learning where to push our creativity and where to keep the scope manageable, giving our ideas room to flourish while still building something we could realistically complete.
Beyond what we built, we’re proud that we made room for learning and experimentation under pressure. We’re leaving with experience we can bring to future projects, both as developers and as teammates.
What we learned
What's next for Youville
Built With
- gemini
- next.js
- node.js
- typescript
