It may not be tax season where you live but governments globally are asking for something from you all year long — your data.

Today, Kodex launched on Product Hunt. It’s a portal enabling companies to easily process, and respond to, information requests from governments and law enforcement all around the world.

How big is this issue? It’s a lot to dig into globally, but we’ll throw a few stats your way. According to a ProtonMail report, the U.S. government has made more than 163,000 user data requests in 2019 alone. Germany — 38,000 times the same year. ProtonMail itself reported a 510% increase in requests since 2010. Same for big tech, with Facebook receiving 8,241 requests from the UK government in the second half of 2020, according to data from Statista.

Big companies have scaled to deal with the requests. Kodex is working to make it all less of a nightmare for the rest.

“Tech giants like Facebook and Google have spent years and millions of dollars building secure online portals to easily comply with government requests – we built a secure online portal for everyone else. No more manually tracking emails & faxes in spreadsheets!”

Co-founder Matt Donahue was formerly doing Counterterrorism Intelligence for the FBI before he started Kodex. He explained:

“It was very surprising to see how even multi-billion dollar companies often struggled to comply with these legal orders. Currently, companies are forced to rely on manually tracking a complex web of emails, faxes, and spreadsheets.”

Co-founder Danny Mendoza, formerly at LendingClub working on fraud analysis, added that the company end-to-end encrypts each company's sensitive data whenever you send it to government agencies.

If these government requests are news to you, it’s worth noting that many companies already have processes in place for how they will protect your data securely when governments ask for it. Kodex’s goal is to make the process easier for more companies.

A new open-source alternative is here for makers.

LiveKit is a free, open-source infrastructure for building real-time audio and video experiences into your applications. Makers can use the APIs to build audio-only spaces, live classrooms, in-game video chat, collaborative screen sharing, and more.

Petcube’s latest pet camera & treat dispenser model is out. Although it's a crowded market, the company is one of the more widely recognized brands among pet cams as a Winter 2016 YC alumn.

What's new? The tagline for Petcube Bites Lite 2 on the website is “all the features, half the cost.”

Now please enjoy this footage of Marshall the cat destroying furniture, caught on an earlier Petcube model.