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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Hi. Thanks for the comment. We only use data that is publicly available (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp (for businesses), etc. Regarding the "big data" logic we use a lot of complex algorithms to provide accurate resolution and to be able to create compelling profiles. We consider ourselves as a "big data" solutions because of the principles we use to aggregate this data.

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So the connected social networking data gathered from a person's use of the 'Contactive' app is kept separate and private?

As with everything, I'll assume nothing is free unless I'm the product.

Just because a phone number is publically available doesn't mean that the owner of that number wants all of their public information aggregated for an unknown purpose, which looks to be a pipeline for sales lead generation.

What use case is your product addressing?

And I'm sorry, but 600 million unique data entries isn't "big data" that would fit into a single Excel 2013 worksheet if you used multiple columns (570 ish columns) but still 1 worksheet.

The 600+ million records are not just unique records since phone numbers are not necessarily primary keys. One of the challenges of Contactive is about indexing and building relationships between phone numbers, emails and social identities. Every time we collect new data, it is stored into the directory and indexed in realtime.

It is also important to know that we only index public data and also we provide an opt-out option if someone wants to be unlisted.

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