Press Kit

Facetts is a platform for building communities with a main focus on privacy and geared towards the mobile generation.

Facetts empowers community creators by giving them a fun and safe place for their members to get to know each other, discuss and grow, be themselves without the burden of having someone watching over their shoulders.

The Siloed tech ensures true privacy by allowing users to join anonymously, not collecting any identifiable personal data (no email, no phone number, no access to contact book / GPS...), and by ensuring that no activities inside Facetts can be linked to other external activities.

Platforms: iOS, Android

Facetts is located in Rennes, France. Is a member of the FrenchTech, and IMT Incubator.
The company is backed up by Business Angels, and has currently 3 employees.
Facetts has been awarded by the BreizhAmerika, WebInLorient, Startup Academy, WestWebValley contests.

Facetts was founded by Valère Fedronic and Elouan Le Coq.
Valère and Elouan are two French entrepreneurs with a strong technical background, they have been working together for 15 years in key roles at Streamezzo and later at Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), travelling around the globe for their job.

Valère is a multi-facetted digital native, that has always been juggling with his various online personas, trying to put boundaries between his gaming, programmer, professional (and much more) identities. Valère‘s concern is how much consumers know about data harvesting, user tracking, and how much they are able to opt-out of it. Besides his activity in Facetts Valere is also a keynote speaker on data privacy and product design and has been seen at the Web2Day and Unit2017.

We started Facetts to fight against commercial surveillance. Several ‘Tech Power Houses’ are gathering data about everyone, from everything they can get their hands on. They're creating personal reputation scores and detailed psychological profiles. We have everlasting personal and intimate data in the hands of algorithms, that can cause accidental outings with sometimes dramatic consequences. More and more people feel this pressure, and they are starting to apply self-censorship.

Online interaction has never been less genuine, it’s hard to have a real conversation on the internet when you know that you’re being watched. Users are more guarded and isolated than ever before.

This will be the major trend fuelling the community industry in 2018, people need community now more than ever, but real and meaningful communities. Facetts is a fresh new actor on his way to disrupt the attention-driven business model, starting with communities, by offering the one thing this toxic system can't, privacy.

Facetts uses technology and innovation to build a better system in term of privacy and security, by reducing the trust chain whenever possible.

We believe that data is a toxic asset, it can backfire when used by creepy algorithms or stolen by hackers.
Facetts follows the principles of:

• Data Minimization: “a good data is a data you don’t collect”. Facetts will not ask for email, phone number, or access to contact book or position, as any of that is necessary for the system to operate.
• Privacy By Design: When you join a community you create a new independent ‘Off-The-Web’ identity, different for each community. Direct Messages sent are encrypted end to end and deleted after delivery, there is no forever server archives of topic discussions.
• SiloTech: The system is designed to avoid data or metadata leaks. We don’t use any SDK that spies on users (ads, tracking, analysis). When you share web links inside the application, the system will prune any tracking parameters and allow you to preview the page without revealing any data (trackingId or IP). We design features and API to reduce surfaces for metadata leaks (presence, relations, etc..), experiment features to watermark screenshots, etc..

Facetts build bridges with other services that put users and their privacy first: you can search images for avatars with Qwant (The search engine that respects your privacy), when needed you can open a link with Brave or Firefox Focus, and soon store shared data with cozy.

Facetts is fighting against commercial surveillance, and therefore use technology like cryptography to reduce the trust between users and the platform, but Facetts’ goal is not to provide any kind of ‘100% bullet-proof military grade’ communication platform.

As a French company, Facetts operates under the French law and therefore has some legal obligations like to keep the time and the IP address of connection.

Founded in 2015 Facetts is launching its new product, Siloed Communities, aimed at groups that needs to create safe, positive and confidential online places to discuss about shared interests. This product is the result of a Pivot initiated in 2017, and will be showcased at the CES 2018.

Facetts’ first product, F7Messenger, is a personal messaging platform that allows users to create and manage easily several independent online identities to communicate freely anywhere without giving their full identity.
While developing and promoting this first product, the team learned that the commercial surveillance and tracking consequences, that are often judged as a benign problem for most, is in reality hurting deeply a part of the population. And as always it is starting with minorities and populations at risks. These users started to tweak and use our first product to build grass root communities with like minded people without compromising their identity or their integrity.
We decided to put our effort and focus in helping them.

While currently in beta, Facetts is very proud to host several communities in the need of stigma free environment around subject related to Health Issues (Mental illness, Food Disorders), Civic (Politic, Unions), Peer Support (preventions, identity crisis) and also small businesses or agencies in the need of a more personal and communal experience that is more manageable than messy groups and with good data ethics (membership based, loyalty programs, product feedback).