Does Prosper.Ai sell my data?

The short answer is an emphatic and unequivocal NO! Put simply, we respect your privacy. Prospero.Ai does not sell PII (Personally Identifying Information). We also don't sell or otherwise provide data that can be used to target you with ads, social engineering, or phishing.

The long answer is still a big no, but we'll get into why we don't sell your data, the way we'd like to use your data in the future (with your consent of course), and what we'll do to protect it.

Why we don't sell your data:

Selling your data is ultimately against our interests

Prospero.Ai's aims to make investing Prosperous for everyone with the goal of helping everyone achieve financial security. We're up against hedge funds that exist to extract the most value out of the stock market as possible, often at the expense of retail traders. They spend billions of dollars annually on data they use to build an advantage. We're not vilifying hedge funds, but our stated goals are at odds with them. Up against heavyweights like them, we can't achieve our stated goals without the help of our community of users, and we can't ask for our community to help us if we haven't earned your trust. Selling your data to them would both help them build that advantage while eroding your trust. In short, we see our users are our partners, not our product, and selling your data would work against us. 

How will Prospero.Ai make money?

Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and all around good guy is quoted as saying "If you aren't paying for the product, then you are the product." We tend to agree with him. We can't ask for your trust if we don't directly address this very valid concern.

Currently, we are fully bootstrapped with no active forms of revenue. We plan to generate revenue with:

Premium Features

Our signals are built to benefit retail traders and if we put them behind a paywall, their ability to help the people who need them most is greatly hampered. As a result, our trading signals are currently free, and they always will be. But we can't get by forever with everything being free. To bring in revenue, we will be releasing premium features as soon as they are ready. These features will be geared toward providing interpretations of the signals and convenience around using them.

Aggregated, Anonymous Data

Our earliest users will remember that we used to have a survey built into the app. Part of our longer term strategy is to bolster our signals with forward looking data. Most of the data used by hedge funds is backward looking. For example they use data that captures what consumers did, data like cameras in retail stores and sales receipts, to predict trends. We plan to use survey questions to capture explicit, forward looking data on consumer intents. This is far more powerful than backward, implicit data and will allow us to provide our users with stronger, more powerful predictions. We removed the survey after it became clear that we had not yet earned the trust required for our users to complete it, but we aim to bring it back after we have.

When we do, we'll again be fully anonymizing it, aggregating it, and bundling it for sale to businesses and analysts. This will be useful for a lot of contexts including companies that want to understand consumer sentiment toward their brands or analysts that want to predict sales trends. Because it is fully anonymized and aggregated, it will only show trends. No PII (Personally Identifying Information) will be included and it will be useless for the purposes of targeted advertising, social engineering, or phishing.

How will Prospero.Ai protect my privacy?

To ensure that your data remains private, it is fully anonymized as soon as it is provided. When the survey was previously live, answers were kept in a separate database with no ties back to a user. To prevent duplicate questions being asked too often, we could see that an individual answered a specific question, and when it would be ok to ask them again, but we couldn't see or otherwise "reverse engineer" a way to connect a specific user to a specific answer. The system was built so that even if Prospero.Ai was acquired, the new owners would not be able to connect individual answers to individual users either.