Joshua Browder is a British-American entrepreneur. He is the founder of DoNotPay, the first chatbot that allows motorists to appeal their parking tickets automatically. In 2018, Browder launched a new version of DoNotPay that allowed users to "swipe" on court settlements and sue.
Browder grew up in Hendon, London. At the age of 18, he began to drive and to incur numerous parking tickets. Having formed the perception that these tickets were disproportionately targeting the elderly and disabled, and noticing the "formulaic nature" of the process by which they could be appealed, Browder created a chatbot called DoNotPay. Since its launch, the site has attracted over 175,000 successful users. According to Browder, it has saved UK and New York motorists an estimated $5 million. According to Forbes, Browder programmed the entirety of the website between the hours of 12am and 3am. He taught himself to code at age 12. In an article on DoNotPay, Roland Vogl, executive director at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics in the United States, said that "chatbots are fairly limited in what they can accomplish and, in this early stage, are more effective at handling narrow tasks."
Expansion
According to Browder, "lawyers all over the world should be very scared of this technology". Outside of fighting parking tickets, DoNotPay has also launched a service to help people save money on flight and hotel reservations. The service scans your email inbox for travel reservations and compares the price, helping users capitalize on price drops. Browder deliberately moved into the house which Facebook founder and entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg used to rent. Browder started sustaining his long hours of coding through a diet consisting primarily of Diet Coke and the "vile" food replacement liquid Soylent. Browder's goal for his new program, plus a busy work schedule, led Legal Cheek to describe him as either "ambitious" or "ridiculous". Browder's technology has received mixed reviews. For example, a writer at The Guardian noted that it "just drafted an impressive notice under the Data Protection Act 1998 not to use my personal information for direct marketing." Similarly, a woman writer with The American Lawyer noted that, "one of DoNotPay's chatbots helped me draft a strong, well-cited and appropriately toned letter requesting extended maternity leave." However, in 2016, the Legal Cheek tested Browder's chatbot with "fairly basic legal questions" and noted that it failed to answer most of them. He contributes to a blog at the Washington, D.C political newspaper The Hill, where he writes about civil rights and the death penalty.
