Updated: There has been a lot of press recently about Rapleaf’s efforts to personalize experiences for consumers. The following are some thoughts by Rapleaf’s CEO Auren Hoffman:
Rapleaf is working on delivering safe personalization to millions of people.
We believe that a more personalized world is a more helpful, efficient, and respectful world. Today, Rapleaf customers help people receive useful product recommendations, enjoy higher levels of customer service, engage directly with candidates running for office, see better ads, receive less spam, and view relevant content. Rapleaf’s customers are helping millions of people have better lives. We love that.
We realize that even with the best of intentions, we sometimes make mistakes; especially in an industry with technology advances moving so quickly. Earlier this month, it was found that dozens of companies including Rapleaf were inadvertently passing Facebook and MySpace IDs to ad networks in a small minority of cases. While dozens of companies made the same mistake Rapleaf did, we were the first company to fix it.
The aggregation of data has big potential upsides and downsides. The bar for data aggregation companies like Rapleaf is very high.
There are a lot of safety areas where Rapleaf is at the forefront. For example, we are ensuring internet users can surf safely, we are one of the first major companies to not collect IP addresses, and we build deep anonymization.
Rapleaf wants to safely personalize experiences for people. And one of the discussion points over the next few weeks should be how data companies like Rapleaf can enable personalization in the most responsible way. We welcome that discussion — please engage with us directly on Twitter (@rapleaf).
-Auren Hoffman, Rapleaf CEO
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5 Comments
Second Tim’s post. You guys are awesome!
I agree with one of the other commenters. there are THOUSANDS of large data companies (Acxiom, Experian, Equifax, Nielsen, Epsilon, Alliance, Transunion, Catalina, InfoUSA, Choicepoint, Lexis Nexis, and thousands of others). Have you ever tried to opt out of any of these data companies? I have tried: it is a nightmare. The process is really arduous and impossible to figure out. I tried to opt out of 7 traditional data companies and after many months, I only got confirmation that I was opted out of one of them.
Whatever one says about Rapleaf, they make it really easy to permanently opt out.
Please point me to a link where I can pull my name and info from your offerings to advertisers. Thanks.
Hi David, you can opt out here: https://www.rapleaf.com/opt_out. Thank you for letting us know – we’ve updated the post with links directly to the opt out and managing preferences page now.
There are thousands of data companies (and over a dozens that have over a $1 billion in revenue). Rapleaf is one of them. I don’t understand why Rapleaf is getting all the attention from the WSJ. I worked at a really impressive data company and the Journal never wrote about us and we had a lot of information about people.
I think there is more scrutiny on Rapleaf because you are in Silicon Valley. Next time you need to be in Little Rock or Houston.
Hats off to you: what you are doing is really hard and I am impressed with your devotion to consumers. Way to go.