Phone Interview with CraigsNumber Founders

I spoke with two of the founders of craigsnumber via phone as a follow up to my previous review of the service. Here are the notes from our phone call. The gentlemen I spoke to preferred to remain anonymous so I will refer to them as CN.

CN: From a legal standpoint we are currently in a “quite period” so we’ll share what we can, but it may be limited out of necessity.

NOTE: All companies, private and public, can be subjected to “quiet periods” when they are working on financial issues such as funding, quarterly announcements, etc. I don’t wish to speculate surrounding the reasons for their quiet period, but I will say this is a valid reason for all the secrecy, at least initially.

The Man: Since your offering is a privacy service (e.g., anonymous Web surfing, anonymous e-mail, etc.), I think the greatest concern would be the secrecy of the user’s information. How will you reassure people that you will keep their secrets?
CN: We share the concern about privacy. In fact, it’s the reason we created the service. Our interest lies in facilitating the needs of those who would use the service for legitimate reasons.

The Man: Do you intend to disclose who is behind this service?
CN: Yes. As soon as we are legally able to do so.

The Man: Is the company a US company subject to US laws?
CN: Yes. The company is based in Silicon Valley and the leadership team has a combined 40 years of related experience.

The Man: How do you intend to monetize or fund this free service?
CN: We plan to build our user base with a number of tools including future value added services. While in beta we are currently seeking feedback to help determine what additional features users would find useful. Our desire is to find ways to keep all of our services free to the end user.

NOTE: There are a number of ways CN can monetize the site without being evil. For example, they could simply include ads on their site. Depending on their infrastructure costs they might also need to offer “for pay” services, but requiring payment would create a real issue for a privacy service since payments often require disclosure of personal information.

The Man: What type of call logs do you maintain and for how long?
CN: We keep the bare minimum information including inbound, outbound, and call duration numbers. We only maintain these logs to meet legal requirements and are only interested in maintaining them for the minimum required time.

The Man: Do you intend to publish a written privacy policy?
CN: Yes. We are currently working on it.

UPDATE (12/31/2006): CN now has a published privacy policy?

I’d like to thank the guys at craigsnumber for taking the time out of their schedule to contact me and also for spending time answering these questions. I should also mention that they are would like to encourage user comments and feedback so feel free to e-mail (info AT craigsnumber.com) them if you have ideas to share.