[shubik22]

Congrats on your product. I'm curious what lead to you all creating this product, after you spent "years working at data brokers."

Perhaps this is too harsh an analogy, but how is this different than someone who spends years working at a tobacco company and then launches a company which sells a smoking cessation product? As other comments here point out, even the process of opting out of these brokers via Optery requires disclosure of personal information and some level of trust. I can imagine the fact that you all previously worked at data brokers make people less likely to trust you with their personal information, rather than more.

[sethherr]

I am also curious about this, and would like a response before signing up. You’ve established your knowledge of data brokerages, but not your motivations.

Did you all have a change of heart? Just see a product opportunity?

[beyondd]

Co-creator of Optery here. Thanks for the good vibes.

The data broker industry is large, and there are hundreds of players across different sub-categories (e.g. people search, email, phone, audience targeting, geolocation, past purchases, TV content viewed, data enrichment, identity graph, etc). Personally, I worked in the audience targeting sub-category for delivering personalized online advertisements. I left the space ~5 years ago when I left Oracle Data Cloud (BlueKai). What we did was anonymized audience targeting for large consumer brand advertisers (i.e. not people search, email, phone, nor anything PII based).

A lot has changed since I entered the space in 2011, and indeed, since I left the space in ~2016. Data has become more weaponized, data brokers have become more brazen in the liberties they take with our data, and the ends they’ll go to circumvent consumer preferences and even privacy laws. Fortunately, a lot of progress is being made. People are becoming more aware, stronger laws are getting passed, technology is being put to better use, and privacy tech is emerging as a more important category.

We felt like we had a lot of inside knowledge of how the industry worked and felt called to put that knowledge to work helping people. This is why providing a Free Basic account that provides a lot of value for free was core to what we wanted to do. Trust is earned over time and we have a lot of work ahead of us given the distrust so many bad actors have established with people’s personal data. We are a new product and company we’re working hard to build trust with our users and customers every day.