Rapleaf's Web: How You Are Profiled On The Web
Earlier, I posted about San Francisco-based Internet information aggregator Rapleaf, a service that collects, sorts and repackages data about many of us who spend an inordinate amount of time on the Internet.
Context & Ripple Effects
The aggregation impulse behind Rapleaf has been building for years in this corpus: Dave's 2005 musings on why he was working on an aggregator, followed by ProfileLinker's 2006 attempt to bundle social networks the way Meebo bundled IM. Rapleaf represents the commercial endpoint of that line — not aggregating feeds for convenience, but collecting, sorting and repackaging personal data about Internet users into profiles.
The telling detail in the pickup pattern is that Rapleaf's own engineering blog responded the same day under the Anonymouse banner insisting 'privacy is an incredibly important issue to us' — a defensive posture that confirms GigaOM's piece landed as an exposé rather than a product announcement, with no independent discussion posts yet to balance either side.
First-order effects
- Internet users whose scattered social-network activity Rapleaf aggregates are being profiled for resale without any direct relationship or transaction with the company.
- Rapleaf is immediately on the defensive, publishing its own privacy rebuttal within hours of the story — evidence the company anticipated that its data practices would read as invasive once described plainly.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and publishers who buy Rapleaf's packaged profiles gain cheap targeting but inherit the reputational risk of how that data was assembled if profiled users connect the dots.
- Other aggregators sitting on similarly repurposed 'public' data now face the same exposure, making visible opt-out mechanisms the likely price of staying in business.
Third-order effects
- If profile-building keeps outrunning disclosure norms, the contested ground becomes where the permission boundary around 'public' data sits — the gap between what users posted for one context and what brokers resell for another is exactly the kind of mismatch that eventually draws regulators.
- The longer-term structure points toward a data-rights layer: services that let people see, correct, or sever the profiles built about them becoming a market of their own rather than an afterthought.
The trend: Personal-data aggregation is scaling faster than the norms governing it, turning every exposé like this one into a forcing function for opt-outs, transparency tools, and eventual broker regulation.