Habeas

Why Habeas?

Habeas exists for a simple reason: people should be able to keep and move their own data without surrendering more control in the process.

Receipts, invoices, statements, investment reports, and similar records are often visible on the websites that created them. But visibility is not the same as control. Many services offer no useful export, keep only partial history, or force people to download documents one by one.

The practical gap: your data may legally be yours, but in practice it can still be difficult to preserve, reuse, or move to another tool.

What problem does Habeas solve?

Habeas helps you recover access to your own records when a service already lets you see them, but makes them hard to keep. It gives you a way to collect those documents from inside your normal browser session and save them where you choose.

Why isn't data portability already enough?

In theory, people are supposed to have access to their own information. In everyday life, that promise often stops at a website dashboard. The service may not provide an API, may not support bulk export, or may make automation fail behind anti-bot systems.

Just as importantly, many existing workarounds ask users to trust yet another intermediary with their credentials and their history. That solves one barrier by creating another.

Why should users have direct control?

Your records are not valuable only on the website that generated them. You may need them for budgeting, accounting, taxes, switching apps, or simply keeping your own archive. Direct control matters because access should not depend on whether a platform decides to keep a convenient export button forever.

Habeas is built around the idea that people should be able to exercise their rights with tools they can inspect, run themselves, and point at destinations they trust.

What principles guide Habeas?

Data sovereignty

Your documents should remain accessible to you, even when a service offers a poor export experience.

User control

You decide when to collect data and where it goes. Nothing should leave your browser unless you choose it.

Privacy by design

Using a data portability tool should not require creating a new database of passwords, sessions, or personal records somewhere else.

Transparency and trust minimization

The safer model is the one that asks you to trust fewer third parties, fewer servers, and fewer hidden processes.

Why does the architecture follow these principles?

Habeas runs where the website already knows it is talking to you: inside your own authenticated browser session. That means you log in yourself, handle MFA yourself, and keep your credentials to yourself.

This architecture is not a technical gimmick. It is a consequence of the project's values. If the goal is to give users more control, the tool should avoid unnecessary intermediaries, avoid storing credentials, and keep the flow understandable.

In short: Habeas is designed so that trust is earned through architecture, not requested through a password prompt.