Does Rapleaf Know too much?
September 1, 2007 – 2:03 pmIn the cozy Facebook social network, it’s easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances. But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers.Rapleaf, based in San Francisco, is building a business on that premise. The privately held start-up, whose investors include Facebook-backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, runs two consumer Web sites: Rapleaf.com, a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address; and Upscoop.com, a similar site to discover, en masse, which social networks to which the people in your contact list belong. To use Upscoop, you must first give the site the username and password of your e-mail account at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL. By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles, which might include a person’s age, birth date, physical address, alma mater, friends, favorite books and music, political affiliations, as well as how long that person has been online, which social networks he frequents, and what applications he’s downloaded.
I like the idea of consolidation of information between social networks, but when you start using that data for marketing it taints the idea. Rapleaf is in the business of trust, and these kind of things foster distrust.
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2 Responses to “Does Rapleaf Know too much?”
Andy - thanks for your thoughts and feedback on Rapleaf. One thing we’re helping people out with is alerting them of information they have online. For example, you may have an outdated social network profile with wrong information that you didn’t think still existed. Rapleaf will help you discover that and manage that information.
Don’t hesitate to contact us anytime with questions.
Cheers!
–Dan
Rapleaf
By Dan on Sep 2, 2007