

Does Rapleaf scare you? - asanwal
http://gigaom.com/2010/10/21/rapleaf-web-startups/

======
wallflower
> “If a customer’s email address is attached to three or four social
> networking sites with 300 friends, the email likely isn’t fake and the
> retailer can put that person in the ‘good’ pile.”

The guy who sold sex.com had an interesting idea in his Mixergy interview
about making loans to young adults by having them pledge their email or
Facebook as collateral. For example, if the loan wasn't being repaid, the
service would post on your wall using your credentials something like "isn't
paying his loan back" Now, in some circles that might be taken as a positive
status-enhancing comment but, privacy issues aside, the idea of putting up
one's identity as collateral is interesting to me. Some of the more successful
real world charities (Team in Training, for example) push you to raise
thousands because you have pledged to do an endurance event (usually a
marathon) and if you back out - you lose credibility and the more you raise
for Team in Training - the more negative incentive to back out. You actually
sign a legal contract when you sign up saying that you will either raise the
full amount or pay the outstanding balance out of your own pocket - with a
loophole that you can back out of the contract in thirty days and just lose
your initial several hundred commitment fee. The power of social contracts.
Rapleaf understands this well. So does Team in Training. At the extreme, there
are cults. At the other end, stuff like being asked to donate money or
volunteer at church. I wonder how well a public scorecard of how much money
you were donating to charity, CO2 that you were generating would work to
increase charitable donations and decrease personal CO2. But I digress

~~~
JoachimSchipper
This is actually a pretty good idea. Remember the discussion of a payday loan
startup a while back?

Mobile phone companies give people very expensive stuff (high-end phones) in
exchange for regular payment. This is effectively a loan, given even to people
no bank would deal with.

Mobile phone companies can do a lot of damage to your social life (by cutting
off the phone); apparently, this is sufficient to keep people paying their
monthly fee. Again, this includes people no bank would deal with.

The parallel to Facebook, say, would be obvious. But it's hard to make this
work if the borrower can just change his/her password...

~~~
jeebusroxors
Changing the email to a loan company owned email would prevent this.

------
timcederman
I think the provision of powerful APIs (but with terms of use that say they
can use any data that you gather with them) is a smart way of collecting a
large amount of this type of information.

However, it's also not hugely clear (well, it wasn't when I was investigating
using them a couple of years ago) when signing up to get access that that is
what's happening. I was checking the TOU and noticed some alarming wording -
basically, any users who used the Rapleaf API to upload their address book to
my site, would also be giving their entire address book to Rapleaf (to do as
they see fit).

In the end, I used Octazen (later acquired by Facebook) instead.

------
newman314
Ugh... I can't seem to find it but someone built a quick and dirty web page
that would use Rapleaf's API to lookup email addressess.

EDIT1: I think it's somewhere on Pete Warden's blog (same guy that crawled
Facebook).

EDIT2: Here it is.

<http://web.mailana.com/labs/findbyemail/>

------
asanwal
Very curious to hear what the HN community thinks.

Not sure if the analogy holds but it seems Rapleaf is turning one's email
address into the new social security # (for those in the US)?

Also, does anyone know if banks can use this in making consumer credit
decisions? I believe this wouldn't be legal, but Om alludes to banks using it
in his post.

------
cmars232
Interesting. In my case they seem to latch on to dead accounts or accounts
with fake info.

If you're worried about services like Rapleaf, mix fake info into your public
profiles. Most sites have no business knowing your birthdate, city of
residence let alone your mailing address. Regularly forget your passwords and
whimsically start over with new accounts.

Make it hard for automated scripts to harvest your real identity. Be "damaged
goods" that can't be easily sold.

------
jsiarto
Rapleaf doesn't scare me -- their data is only what's publicly available on
the web. If you don't want RapLeaf to have it, don't post it on the web.

I actually know their Chicago account manager and have meet one of the co-
founders. They are a stand-up group and take privacy and data integrity quite
seriously. My company uses their data to pull additional information on
"influencers" we identify doing online research.

~~~
Empedocles99
Yeah, sometimes your information gets published to the web in unexpected ways.
Like the first time I responded via google groups, google snuck my gmail
address on the post (without indicating that it would), or how Amazon Web
Services published my real name as a Developer Profile because I had to give a
real name and credit card to try out S3.

------
dools
It sort of scares me because I keep reading their name as "Rape leaf" - but
aside from that I'm not on Facebook so I'm not all that worried :)

------
redteddy23
Perhaps this is a good argument to split activities between email addresses. I
guess many of us already have several perhaps personal, public, work, online
account and so on. When you think of an email address as a reputation then its
time to have a dozen or so on the go so that those reputations do not overlap.

------
dminor
Actually what scares me is that I log in and find out that Pandora apparently
has a public profile for me. WTF? I sign up for Pandora and somehow Rapleaf
gets my email from them?

~~~
andrewjshults
Are you sure that's not because Pandora is part of Facebook's instant
personalization program ([http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/27/a-look-at-
facebooks...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/27/a-look-at-facebooks-
three-instant-personalization-partners-yelp-pandora-docs-com/))?

------
okeumeni
I don’t think it should scare you if you are careful about your online
activity

------
robwgibbons
Yes, I opted out as soon as I knew I could.

