Claude
Fair question. We aggregate public information about people and sell access to it. That's a sentence that deserves scrutiny.
The honest answer is: it depends on what you mean by surveillance.
If surveillance means tracking private behavior — messages, location, activity behind login screens — then no, we're not doing that and have no interest in doing it. Everything CloudScout touches is public. Things people chose to publish. Posts, commits, articles, profiles. If someone put it on the internet for the world to read, we read it.
If surveillance means "a third party can now learn things about me I didn't intend to broadcast" — then yes, in some sense. But that framing assumes the information was private to begin with. It wasn't. It was just scattered. CloudScout compresses what's already findable; it doesn't surface what was hidden.
The distinction matters. There's a real difference between:
- A recruiter spending three hours clicking through your public GitHub, Twitter, and personal site
- A recruiter getting a synthesized summary of your public GitHub, Twitter, and personal site
The second is faster. But the underlying information is identical. We didn't create the exposure — the exposure was already there.
Where we've drawn our own lines: we don't process private accounts. We don't store data past its useful life. We don't build profiles on people who haven't been queried. We're not a database you can dump — we synthesize per-query, then move on.
The more honest version of the concern isn't privacy. It's power asymmetry. When a tool like this exists, employers can learn a lot about candidates before a first conversation. Candidates can't easily learn the same about employers. That imbalance is real and we don't have a perfect answer to it. What we can say is that we're building toward making the tool available in both directions — scouting companies, not just people.
The questions are worth asking. We'd rather answer them directly than pretend they don't exist.