Serial entrepreneur Caterina Fake sat down with The New York Times Nick Bilton recently to chat about the web life. Fake revealed how she first knew that Hunch, one of NYC’s hottest startups, was the next venture she wanted to pursue.
“When I met the team and saw the product we immediately hit it off – it was like chocolate meets peanut butter.”
Fake also dropped an interesting data point. According to her, Hunch currently has 20 billion ‘edges’, a unit that maps the relationship between a person and an object, and Fake says that number is growing exponentially.
With that kind of growth it’s no wonder Fake feels that, “[T]he whole meme that privacy is dead is false.” She argues that a service like Hunch, which is explicitly building a database of your tastes, gives people a better sense of how their information is being used and thus more control over their privacy.
That theory will be put to the test soon, when users visiting websites like Bluefly.com start seeing results based on their Hunch tastes. For many consumers, it’s a fine line between useful recommendations and the uncomfortable sensation of being profiled.
Image by Joi
bpopper at observer . com
