Interview with Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf

Rapleaf is creating a portable social graph of the Web. We have graphed out over 42 million people. And we allow companies to access that graph so that they can provide better products to consumers.

The social graph is basically who you are friends with, who you know and how you potentially know them and how those relationships are around us.

That is a small, but important piece. More importantly there are all of these other people that you might be interacting with online, or you are linking to on your blogs, or you are talking with in a forum, a discussion forum and that you have a relationship with.

There will be a way for consumers to sign up and see the publicly available information that exists on them on the Web; at least, the publicly available information that we were able to find on them. They can then use that to manage their identity and identification online. Basically, anything we can find, anyone else can find. Rapleaf only finds publicly available information on people, and it will be really great if consumers can understand very easily what other people can find on them quickly.

We allow companies to understand who you know better so that they can provide you with better user experience. That could be a lot of different types of things, like, maybe, they are providing you with a better movie recommendation or hotel recommendation or some other types of things so that they can understand who you know better. Or it could just be directly. Ideally, you can get ideas that your graph is portable so you show up somewhere and you could take that graph with you.

There is no limit to the imagination as to what one could do if they had access to a social graph. I think, once people realize they can access the social graph and it’s not just behind some walled garden somewhere, then we are going to see developers use their imagination in ways that we can’t even think of.

You may fly on United Airlines, and they are going to seat you next to a friend of a friend. Or when you show up to Marriott, they might ask you when you show up; do you want me to alert your friends that you are here?

You can imagine a lot of different things that would happen when developers really use their imagination, using this portable social graph.

Yes.

We are providing the graph and the data and giving people the APIs and the tools to basically build things on top of that data.

We are working with some current customers right now to build some really cool things that they are going to be launching over the next couple of months. Then, we are going to be showcasing and hopefully that will spur other innovation and other people to do really cool things with that data.

We’re in some ways just a data provider. In some ways it’s not different from how Google Maps works. If you are a power user of Google Maps and if your website is calling Google Maps a lot, you get a certain number of calls to Google Maps for free. And then after that you have to pay Google every time you query, or if you are really big you might negotiate a monthly fee that you pay to Google. We envision charging in a way similar to that.

Basically we searched 140 million people. We crawled the Internet, we crawled the public data and email on these people. And then we built these profiles on people. The profiles consists of a lot of things, but the most important thing is who these people know, and then we create a big graph out of that. We’re adding about 800,000 people a day.

I think your social graph can be useful anywhere you go. Most places you go have some sort of concept of a graph, but they have used a very little bit of it because it is very hard currently to recreate your graph everywhere you go.

For example. I’m a Netflix user. I love Netflix, I think, it’s a great service. You can share cues with your friends, and you can share reviews and other types of things, what movies you have rented, with your friends. It’s great.

So, I share it with my brother. My brother and I have very similar movie tastes, and we really like sharing these things. However, I really haven’t shared it with most people because I only have like two friends in Netflix. Recreating my graph in Netflix would just take me too long to do. They’re not really set up for me to do that, and it doesn’t really work very well.

Now, if I could just bring my graph to Netflix and then I could choose off that graph which of the people I want to share with… Obviously it’s sensitive information, which movies I get. It’s not going to be with my full graph, but maybe it’s with a portion of my graph. That would be really useful to me, and really useful to a lot of people that use Netflix.

Another thing could be when I visit a city or something. I’m going somewhere and it would be interesting… I really like this service called Doppler. Doppler is a great service. I show up at Doppler and I can put in what cities I’m going to, and then it can alert my friends if we’re going to be in the same city at the same time.

That’s really useful, especially if you’re in a random city. I was in Salt Lake City, and it turned out someone else I know was in Salt Lake City, and we could meet up. It’s kind of cool.

However, the problem is that I have to recreate my graph in Doppler. I may actually do that in Doppler, because it is quite a useful service. It would be much more beneficial for me as a user if I could just show up and I had my graph with me, and then I could just tell Doppler which of these people I would like to share my travel with.

I think, that in a data driven world, consumers should have the right to control their own data. The government shouldn’t control it, companies shouldn’t control, although the government and companies have a lot of responsibility dealing with that data. The consumer should have the ultimate right.

In the end, ultimately the data should be owned by the consumer himself or herself. That means a few things. That means consumers should have a right to go to another site and ask that company, “Tell me all the information that you know about me.”

So, for instance, if I walk into Macy’s the store, and let’s say they’re tracking what aisle I’m walking down, if I go to them they should actually show me the information they’re tracking on me. Or, if they know what I’ve bought, even if it’s an offline environment, they should be able to tell me that.

In any environment, I believe people should be able to see the information that they have. Now, we haven’t done that yet at Rapleaf. We hope to do that in the future. I hope that a lot of other companies do that soon as well. Essentially, sunlight in this case we believe is the best disinfectant.

The second thing that we think is important for people is that you should have the ability to change the data if it’s incorrect, to delete some or all of the data that you don’t want there. Basically, to change or delete some or all of the data. We think that’s really, really important. It’s very important for consumers to be able to do that.

The third thing is, you should be able to move the data. If a company is tracking on your advertisements what you’re clicking on and stuff like that, that might be fine and that might actually be beneficial to you. You might want them to do that. You even might want a new company to have that information as well, because it could be potentially helpful to you and you could see better advertisements.

You should be able to move that data over to some other company. Data about you wherever you go should be portable if you give access to that information to make it portable.

Now, a lot of things are maybe a long time away from happening, but it doesn’t means that companies, whether it be small companies like Rapleaf or big companies like Google or Axiom or ChoicePoint shouldn’t be focused on working toward those goals.

I think that’s a very tough question. Eventually, the will government regulate this activity whether people want government to or not because I think, it is quite sensitive. The government will get involved, especially as breaches of this information become more common place. The reason why it’s a big problem is there is more data being collected about you than ever. It’s something that I think, is even scarier is that the number of organizations that are collecting data about you is also increasing every year as well.

So there’s hundreds and thousands of companies which are collecting very detailed data about you today. Those companies include big companies like Google, but they also include very small companies like some store you walked into one time and made a purchase, to a whole bunch of other government institutions, to the library, to DMV, to a lots of other places which are collecting data about you. Some other companies have breaches of information, sometimes they lose data, sometimes they’re careless, sometimes these companies maybe a small number but because the log numbers are so large, it could be a significant number are bad companies and they might be doing bad things with the data.

Because of that, I think, this always makes me as a consumer worry and, I suspect, they will make other consumers worry as well. So, I think, companies will, eventually, have a choice. Either they’ll allow consumers to have control over data and they’ll do their best to self regulate that’s what we hope to do at Rapleaf…or maybe, potentially, government will regulate it themselves.

Now, when government does regulate, it got two choices. They can regulate from top down kind of EU type manner or they can regulate by empowering consumers or allowing consumers to have access to the data and have access to sunlight. I hope that when government does regulate, they regulate in a way that will empowers me, as a consumer, and allows me to decide how I want to share this data with people rather than telling me, as a consumer, how I must share that data with people.

Absolutely. This is why regulation often doesn’t work in a fast changing environment because it’s very unclear how this data will be used in the future. Like all technology, data can be used for good and it can be used for things that aren’t so good. Nuclear technology can stop me from having to use oil and coal and it could power the energy of all the super computers like Google and it could also be used for very bad things like bots. Obviously, Google itself, as a search engine, can be used for good and I would say like 99% of the time, it’s used for good. But, there is a small percent of the time where people use it to stalk people or to find out things like how to make a bomb or to learn about other things that people might do on Google.

So generally, technology is used for good but there are many instances where it’s not. It’s unclear sometimes how you regulate it because it moves so quickly. In this case, in the data case, it’s sometimes unclear how it’s going to be used in the future. The only thing we know is that some of the users will be quite good and quite beneficial to consumers. There will be some uses which will not be so good or, at least, to certain consumers, they’ll not feel it’s very good. Those things should if there’s some sort of consensus around it should be regulated or hindered or stopped in some way.