Recently I opened a Seen.is account, as I'd heard it's more "private" than Facebook, and all that. I also know several who opened an Unseen.is email account. They're based in Iceland, and supposedly follow Iceland's privacy laws, which I'm sure are a bit more "privacy respectful" that the U.S. CORP's NSAed "collect 'em all, figure out who the 'terrorists' are later".
I've seen internetty stuff out there that said something like Seen.is and Unseen.is are connected to a guy (Chris Kitze) who used to be with Intelius (internetty implication: "They're 'bad'").
So I post the email they sent to Seen.is and Unseen.is users.
Unseen (and Seen) are totally separate companies from Intelius or any other company and other than me, there are zero other Intelius shareholders in Unseen. We don't have any VC's or big companies or even other large outside investors, it's owned by me and the other people who work there. The company and servers are based in Iceland. It's an Icelandic private company, an ehf. It has absolutely nothing to do with Intelius.
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Hello users,
The smear campaign against Seen has moved to Europe, now in the form of a blog that makes several accusations against Seen and Seen's owner, Chris Kitze.
In Europe they do not have the background checkers and people finders which use public data that we have in the US.
They are thus unable to run background checks on prospective employees, and a child abuser is quite safe applying for a job at a day care center, or a convicted thief as a cashier in a store.
The spin on this blog is that it is a bad thing to be able to run background checks. We in the US think it is a valuable service.
Because the rumors are coming thicker every day, we thought it best to send our response to ALL our users, so they can hear the truth about the matter.
Ask yourself one question, who is spreading these rumors? And why? Do they really have your best interests at heart?
Here is Chris' answer to one of our users, regarding this latest rumor:
Several things you should understand about Intelius. It's true I have been a director there for several years, I was also an early investor. It's now called iNome. I'm not the CEO of that company at all, just a very tiny investor and director. That's a huge difference. Yes, that company was sued because of what another company did with the customers and lawsuits usually claim all kinds of things that might or might not be true. Those lawsuits were all resolved.
You need to understand, in the U.S. directors of companies are not involved in the day to day affairs of the company. Everything Intelius does is inside the US and follows US laws. They provide PUBLIC records, these are used by companies (and some individuals) to do background checks on people for hiring, etc. Keep in mind, this can be people's arrest records, which are PUBLIC in the U.S., among other things, that are used by people to decide if they should hire someone to babysit their children or hire for a job. Imagine if you hire someone to work at a bank who is a convicted bank robber! Or a child molester to baby sit your children!! That's the issue and there are quite a number of people who avoided a big problem using Intelius. Some things really do need to be out in public.
However, there are most definitely things that need to be kept in private. That's why I got together with some friends of mine to start Seen and Unseen. People are being abused by Google and Facebook and I haven't even gotten to the state security services. You know all about these. We did this also to help get news about the persecution of Falun Gong out to the world and especially to China. Many of us do this very peaceful meditation which is severely persecuted in China:
http://faluninfo.net
This is very important for people to know about.
Unseen (and Seen) are totally separate companies from Intelius or any other company and other than me, there are zero other Intelius shareholders in Unseen. We don't have any VC's or big companies or even other large outside investors, it's owned by me and the other people who work there. The company and servers are based in Iceland. It's an Icelandic private company, an ehf. It has absolutely nothing to do with Intelius.
We don't do ANY data mining whatsoever with Seen or Unseen, they're based in Iceland and I'm not even sure it would be legal to do that in Iceland. We barely even keep logs, only to protect from abuse and these are deleted regularly. If people delete things, we don't keep copies around. We don't run any ads on Unseen, but we'll need to run ads for free users on Seen.is to pay for the servers and bandwidth, which are pretty expensive in Iceland. Another thing is our encryption is pretty good and it's pretty easy to use, as I think you discovered. The premium account on Unseen will in the future turn off all the ads on Seen and turn on stronger encryption. Keep in mind, Seen is designed to be out in the open, but not open to the big companies like Google. We think this leaves the user in charge of their data.
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