When a company has multiple subsidiaries/company names and they have less than 100 employees . . . a red flag should go up. When a company spends way too much time trying to incorporate any combination of the words: “no evil” , “ethical” , “privacy” , “trust” into any portion of their name, tagline, or mission statement - its time to ask some hard questions . . .

These TrustFuse guys (dont even know which name call them) are begging for it . . . I was reading “At Rapleaf, your personals are public” and it made me speechless.

First reaction - brilliant business model and concept

Second reaction - please stay as far away from me as possible

We should not forget that Abacus was a legal business and so was DoubleClick . . . but the combination of the two was completely toxic (and thus the merger was canceled) . . . the velocity with which personal information can travel in the digital world very much re-define the moral responsibility of the company holding such an information.

Sites like Rapleaf are also trying to be social networks, urging people to become members and claim their identities across multiple networks so they can manage their reputation and privacy. In fact, Hoffman says Rapleaf is designed to help people protect their privacy.

“We’re helping you manage your privacy. You might not even know there’s all these things about you out there. We’re learning all this stuff about you. And now you can manage all this information,” Hoffman said.

Let me get this straight . . . you gather all this information about me, put it at one location so that credit card marketers can find easily . . . and for the privilege of not being spammed, I need to give into the blackmail, sign up on your system and opt out. How about this, why dont you NOT share this information by default. And if I happen to change my mind, I’ll go sign up and let people contact me . . . in return . . . I get a cut of what ever money you made off me? Sounds more fair?

One big question about Rapleaf is how it obtains access to people’s social-networking profiles, considering that sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn don’t publish their members’ e-mail addresses as a matter of policy. When asked, representatives from these social networks said that they do not have partnerships with Rapleaf, nor other search engines, to provide access to e-mail addresses.

Rapleaf’s Hoffman said that the company finds profiles through the e-mail search at certain sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and Amazon. MySpace, for example, lets visitors find a profile by e-mail address or first and last name. But for other sites, Rapleaf employs a “secret sauce,” according to Hoffman. It’s not always easy either. Hoffman said the company hasn’t figured out how to crack into accessing members on Digg, for example, even though it would like to.

Eh . . . so you guys violated the terms of service at a social networking site, used a functional loop hole to get my personal information (such as my email address) - which I explicitly told the social network not to share to anyone outside of my friends . . . . Sounds brilliant to me, definitely worth a patent - “Method and System to Circumvent Privacy Policy of Websites to Gather Private Personal Information.” The chief privacy officer dude at Myspace is just about to freak out envisioning all the lawsuits he is going to get for the security breach.

Being serious for a second. RapLeaf’s argument that these are already publicly available information is certainly valid. The point that they need to re-examine is the fact “with great powers data comes great responsibilities” I.E. . . the aggregation of the data and the ease with which they made the data searchable IS the defining difference which re-assigns the responsibility of privacy away from the end user onto the company.