Meet Fides: Privacy as Code

⚡ Overview

Fides (pronounced /fee-dhez/, from Latin: Fidēs) is an open-source privacy engineering platform for managing the fulfillment of data privacy requests in your runtime environment, and the enforcement of privacy regulations in your code.

🚀 Quick Start

Getting Started

In order to get started quickly with Fides, a sample project is bundled within the Fides CLI that will set up a server, privacy center, and a sample application for you to experiment with.

Minimum requirements (for all platforms)

• Docker (version 20.10.11 or later)
• Python (version 3.9 through 3.10)

Download and install Fides

Tip

We highly recommend setting up a Python virtual environment such as venv to install Fides into. For example:

mkdir ~/fides
cd ~/fides
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Once your virtual environment is ready, you can easily download and install Fides using pip. Run the following command to get started:

pip install ethyca-fides

Deploy the Fides sample project

By default, Fides ships with a small project belonging to a fictional e-commerce store. Running the fides deploy up command builds a Fides project with all you need to run your first Data Subject Request against real databases.

fides deploy up

Explore the sample project

When your deployment finishes, a welcome screen will explain the key components of Fides and the sample "Cookie House" project.

If your browser does not open automatically, you should navigate to http://localhost:3000/landing.

The project contains:

• The Fides Admin UI for managing privacy requests
• The Fides Privacy Center for submitting requests
• The sample "Cookie House" eCommerce site for testing
• A DSR Directory on your computer to view results (./fides_uploads)

Run your first Privacy Access Request

Navigate to the Fides Privacy Center (http://localhost:3001), submit a "Download your data" request, provide the email address for the sample user (jane@example.com), and submit the request.

Then, navigate to the Fides Admin UI (http://localhost:8080) to review the pending privacy request.

Use username root_user and password Testpassword1! to login, approve the request, and review the resulting package in your ./fides_uploads folder!

Next Steps

Congratulations! You've just run an entire privacy request in under 5 minutes! Fides offers many more tools to help take control of your data privacy. To find out more, you can run a privacy request on your own infrastructure, discover data mapping, or learn about the Fides Taxonomy.

📖 Learn More

The Fides core team is committed to providing a variety of documentation to help get you started using Fides. As such, all interactions are governed by the Fides Code of Conduct.

Documentation

For more information on getting started with Fides, how to configure and set up Fides, and more about the Fides ecosystem of open source projects:

• Documentation: https://ethyca.com/docs
• Website: www.ethyca.com/fides

Support

Join the conversation on:

• Slack
• Twitter
• Discussions

Contributing

We welcome and encourage all types of contributions and improvements! Please see our contribution guide to opening issues for bugs, new features, and security or experience enhancements.

Read about the Fides community or dive into the contributor guides for information about contributions, documentation, code style, testing and more. Ethyca is committed to fostering a safe and collaborative environment, such that all interactions are governed by the Fides Code of Conduct.

⚖️ License

The Fides ecosystem of tools are licensed under the Apache Software License Version 2.0. Fides tools are built on fideslang, the Fides language specification, which is licensed under CC by 4.

Fides is created and sponsored by Ethyca: a developer tools company building the trust infrastructure of the internet. If you have questions or need assistance getting started, let us know at fides@ethyca.com!

⚠️ Advanced Setup for Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) Support

By default, running pip install ethyca-fides locally will not install the optional Python libraries needed for Microsoft SQL Server, since these rely on additional system dependencies (freetds)! However, if you do want to connect to MSSQL, you have two options:

1. Use our pre-built Docker images which install these optional dependencies automatically: ethyca/fides. See our Deployment Guide for more!
2. Install the required dependencies on your local development machine and run pip install "ethyca-fides[all]" to include "all" the optional libraries. Keep reading to learn more about this!

For local development setup on macOS, follow these steps:

1. Install the required development libraries from Homebrew:

brew install freetds openssl

2. Add the following to your shell (i.e. .zshrc) to ensure your compiler can access the freetds and openssl libraries, updating the paths & versions to match your local install:

export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/Cellar/freetds/1.3.18/lib -L/opt/homebrew/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1u/lib"
export CFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/Cellar/freetds/1.3.18/include"

3. Reinstall Fides with MSSQL support by including the all extra requirement:

pip install ethyca-fides[all]