We don't have to be friends on Facebook, but I can still see hundreds of pictures of you. You do not have to follow me on Instagram, but I can download your stories and pictures even if you have a private profile. Give me a phone number, and there is an engineer at Singtel. I can call to get your physical location right now and the apps you have installed on your phone. If you posted it, the chances are that I will have it.
I have identified personal data as the next treasure trove, that will
- increasingly get harder to procure as the world wakes up to understand precisely how much the internet giants are exploiting your trust and negligence
- Become more valuable
And since the data is already out there, the story goes like this:
- We started with bypass tools such as Gom VPN (We help people gain access to content that is blocked)
- Then we launched Proxycurl, our internet-scale web-crawling infrastructure (We provide businesses with a way method to gain access to data they cannot procure)
- With that, we will collect data about humans, build a database, and productize that with SapienGraph. (To commoditize data)
What can you do with SapienGraph?
With SapienGraph, you can find anyone with a photo, and get his/her Instagram username, and see what he/she has posted on any platform since he/she started using the internet. All that in 1 second.
Your content is not going away, and people will not stop trying to search for it
As Jeff Bezos said: find one thing that will not change in the next ten years. I am willing to bet that ten years from now, men are still going to be searching for that hot girl on the internet. The same way that the government intelligence agencies will require an internet-scale people search. Your content is not going away, and people will not stop trying to search for it, and there is money in that.