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EveryoneAPI

everyoneapi.com

30 pointsmooreds32 comments

I think the website illustrates perfectly what can be wrong with a landing page, I had absolutely no idea what the product is suppose to do. Is it a mocking api generating fake user data ? "A Simple Data API" is also to vague to get an idea on what the product is doing. (I had the answer when having a look at the footer but I'm not sure everyone will have a look at the footer).

The pricing page is also really terrible, I see a list of prices for data types but I have no idea how it's actually billed. There is a small infobox on the bottom saying that I'm billed for each successful request, but that should be on the top since I had no idea what the price meant (the button is not inside the box as any pricing page by the way).

It would be also nice to have a price average for the api, how much does it cost to look-up basic customer info on 1000 numbers ? I have to use a calculator to answer that.

(By the way does it work outside the US ? I can only see US phone formats and zip codes).

Agreed. My best guess would have been that the service is an API that allows you to access information on individuals. I suppose this could be useful, but I don't immediately see what "powerful apps" I would build.

On the CRM/targeted marketing side, there are use cases for finding out address and other personal info from any tidbit of information you have. Many times you only get an email or phone, or on the flip side a name + address.

Few examples: In a call center environment, looking up the name and address of the caller to know who you're talking to. Matching loosely on name and zip code can provide the operator with a good idea who they are talking to. The system can then match the caller to demographic and interest data to better support sales/marketing/routing decisions.

We use fullcontact to get social profile (twitter, fb, angellist, linkedin, etc) based on an email or phone number in order to better know the user and their social influence that they can have for our customers. Why? Many third party booking systems (flights, hotels, misc travel, etc) provide only the required fields to make the booking stick with the provider (hotel, for example), in order to prevent the provider from contacting the customer directly and taking away that third party booking service (Expedia, for example) revenue. As such, if Expedia only sends name and zip code, or name and phone number, we can match that with existing public data and/or look it up in fullcontact (or something like this phone reverse lookup) in order to get a more complete profile of a guest.

No terms and conditions, no privacy policy, no about us, no way of knowing whether these details were lawfully obtained.

After some digging, looks like it's by these guys: https://www.telephonyresearch.com/

Also looks to be a spin off of their other product: https://www.opencnam.com/

I found terms... https://www.everyoneapi.com/terms

Looks like that page was added after my comment, and before yours. Google Cache shows the link in the footer not present 3 days ago. [1]

Also, I notice you've only ever commented on 3 different HN topics all of which relate to this service, so I'm going to hazard a guess and say you're linked in some way to this project, and thought you'd add the terms link, and post this comment in an attempt to discredit my comment.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1lkLIOR...

The terms are identical, a simple copy/paste.

https://www.opencnam.com/terms

https://www.everyoneapi.com/terms

This is pretty scary. I imagine this is public information, but making it easily accessible just makes it a little more frightening.

As mentioned in many of the other comments, the site does not do a good job or explaining it's purpose. As far as I can tell, it's a database of personal information indexed by telephone number. While this information may be public, it raises privacy concerns, and I do not necessarily condone their right to sell it. Furthermore, I'm very curious as to the "location.geo" attribute that specifies the user's latitude and longitude -- is this in real time? (meaning they can track individual users somehow) or is it based off of the billing address of an associated account? -- either way, I definitely do not condone selling a users's location information.

I want to know if they have information about me, if so, I want it off.

Edit: I signed up with a throwaway account and you can't make a single query without paying. Makes the "try it" link seem misleading to me.

Comeonnow above linked to another product of theirs; https://www.opencnam.com it has a "hobby" tier, might be worth a look to see what they have on you.

This really needs a better brochure site. The actual purpose of the service is hidden at the bottom left:

"EveryoneAPI is a simple data service that provides business developers with the easiest and most comprehensive way to access telephone data on the web."

Even then it's pretty obscure. Are we talking worldwide? US only? What's the data source?

Well, it says "everyone" on the box!

What problem does this solve, and how will it be paid for?

My take: if you're handling marketing and all you have is someone's phone number you can gather quite a bit of data about that person so you can segment them for marketing purposes.

The site talks about "telephone data" yet the picture example (https://www.everyoneapi.com/static/img/bruce.png) has a status (presume relationship) of "single", what else are they using apart from "telephone data"?

When I'm watching at their example, the only 'status' field has a value of 'true'. I don't think it's about relationship, more likely about the phone-line being active.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would use this. Can you present a compelling use case for it?

Because no one I know is saying "gosh I wish I could publish my personal information somewhere, but there's just no way to do it!"

My sense from reading the page is that it's not designed for you to put data in, rather it's designed to allow someone get data out with just a phone number. Primary use case is probably for gathering additional market segmentation data automatically.

Marketing. I have someone's phone number now I can get further info to build a dossier on them for targeted marketing efforts.

OP - Bitcoin payment link is down..

Sales. Prospect calls, phonenumber gets recognized, agent gets all information about the person calling on screen.

We were thinking about doing something like this as a demo of our cloud database http://schemafreedb.com/. At first that is what I thought this was a demo of a cloud DB.

There is something seriously wrong with the paperclip.

Doesn't seem to work outside US, an awful landing page and numerous bugs (bitcoin payment doesn't work).

What are their data sources? How reliable is it? How do they keep it fresh? No mention.

Their pricing belies their origins, that is indeed standard enterprise data pricing.

Why would I sign up my information? Seriously. Why?

Not sure what you mean. I don't think this is opt in.

Then this is the most massive breach of privacy laws I have ever seen presented to me.

I'm pretty sure this is public information..

Public whitepages type data or opengraph stuff...

This is creappy as hell

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