Your Data, Your Rules: How Cloaked Puts You in Control of Privacy and Security

Intro  0:01  

Welcome to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast. Like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st century.

 

Jodi Daniels  0:22  

Hi, Jodi Daniels here. I’m the founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and certified informational privacy professional providing practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies.

 

Justin Daniels  0:35  

Hi, I am Justin Daniels, I am a shareholder and corporate M&A and tech transaction lawyer at the law firm Baker Donelson, advising companies in the deployment and scaling of technology. Since data is critical to every transaction, I help clients make informed business decisions while managing data privacy and cyber security risk. And when needed, I lead the legal cyber data breach response brigade.

 

Jodi Daniels  0:58  

And this episode is brought to you by Red Clover Advisors, we help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology e commerce, professional services and digital media. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business together. We’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers to learn more and to check out our best-selling book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time, visit redcloveradvisors.com now, I hope people are listening, of course, but some people also like to watch on YouTube, and so for anyone who goes to YouTube, oftentimes you might see maybe just Jodi Daniels in our little Zoom recording box. But today is a very special day, because today it says Jodi and Justin Daniels in our little Zoom recording box. So everyone listening, you have to go to the YouTube channel to catch this episode, so that you know, it is not just Jodi Daniels talking in this podcast.

 

Justin Daniels  2:05  

Until I change it to Jodi and a third-round draft pick co-host to be named later.

 

Jodi Daniels  2:12  

All right. I hope you are happy. We are ready to get started, though we are, how’s your name in the box? Indeed, it does. All right, off you go.

 

Justin Daniels  2:22  

So today we have a really interesting company that’s with us today to talk about some really interesting take on Privacy and Technology with their business. So today we have with us Arjun and Abhijay Bhatnagar, who are the co-founders of Cloaked.

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  2:44  

Well, yeah, sorry. Thanks for having us.

 

Justin Daniels  2:46  

We’re excited to have you and talk about to —

 

Jodi Daniels  2:50  

Keep explaining who Cloaked is. There’s more to the intro. Well, then I’m gonna chop your name off.

 

Justin Daniels  2:56  

I’ve been, I’ve been let off the island. Really, you fired me.

 

Jodi Daniels  2:59  

Not yet. So you get it, you can redeem myself. Do people want to keep listening to this awesome episode? Fair enough?

 

Justin Daniels  3:08  

So sorry, listeners. So as developers and privacy advocates, they have created a secure all in one privacy platform to give consumers control over their personal information, past, present and future, while helping reshape how industries access, use and think about data. Welcome to the show.

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  3:29  

Thanks for having us.

 

Jodi Daniels  3:32  

So we always like to start with understanding how people got to where they are. So can you tell us about your career journey to becoming founders?

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  3:43  

Yeah. Well, obviously, I guess I can kick us off, and you can add in more detail, but one letting the cat out of the bag. Abhijay and I are both brothers, so we joke from Legos to startups, we were working our whole lives together, but our guess, each of us had our own career journey, but I think both grounded in engineering and wanted to build things. I from an early age. I think as young as 10, I started learning how to code, became an actual engineer at a company. At 11, was a senior engineer. About 12, I’ve been working my whole life and technology kind of working through the ranks from an engineer all the way to CTO at Big and small companies alike, always been passionate around how building things, products, how it impacts lives and so either software, hardware or creating things physically. It’s always been exciting for me, and I think building our own startup has also been a gradual journey, obviously a little bit about kind of our past, but we actually sold our first company years ago, and that was obviously and I working together, and I think that’s always been an aspect of when you build with somebody, or build somebody you trust, and I think we’ve got a really good dynamic between how we work together and between the companies we worked at, and now the companies we’ve been building. It’s been built on years experience. Dub ourselves, or just technology always guiding us, but Abhijay, let’s turn to you.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  5:04  

Yeah. I mean, we have a pretty unwind story, so he covered a lot of it. I think similarly, grew up in a very problem-solving mindset at household, and we had our first startup founder when I was like 15. Maybe it all blurs now, and we exit, everyone’s like 16 or 17, so that’s quite exciting. And we spar away slightly, sort of post high school for me, and sort of into college, and then COVID struck in between. I worked at a couple different companies. Miter is a big research fund firm. Did a lot of health care, data stuff there, but COVID happened, and we sort of had a nice happenstance. Well, a good silver lining to COVID was we woke up, got brought back to our home, and one thing led to another, and here we are today. Here we are today.

 

Justin Daniels  5:56  

So does that mean when you guys work together at a company, you got hired together?

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  6:01  

Yeah, go ahead. No, we haven’t actually worked for anybody else together. Technically. Yeah, we had, Arden, had a different startup in between, which I was a little. I was happy for him.

 

Justin Daniels  6:20  

I was just curious, because sometimes how Jodi and I started things was through people and things we had done together, like, oh, we’d like to see more of that. But anyway, what problem is Cloaked trying to solve from your perspective?

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  6:39  

Yeah, it’s always an interesting thing to unpack privacy, I think, by design at this point, from big tech and government has become too big of a catch all word where everything and anything is in privacy, security is intertwined, theft is intertwined, defense, surveillance, access, ownership, fundamental democracies, all these things kind of connect together. And I think that’s been a big thing for us, is learning around, how do we unpack the word for people? I think what we’ve learned is that the problem that club is trying to solve is think about at every layer of kind of, what we call the stack, how do you make a meaningful impact for someone’s life? And what that means and looks like is first thinking about security. What is the safety of the individual of the family, the vectors attack, this can be and form the tool software that can help enable protection, encryption, stopping fingerprinting, fraud, abuse, physical kind of identification. These are ways that kind of come in and start to really identify how you could be vulnerable. So close trying to take that side. The next layer we talk about on top of that is something we call, we define as privacy. Where does my data live? Who has access to it? What does it look like? So touching upon the points of where everything about you is everywhere. How do you have some sense of control? We want to play a role in that side. But it comes down to what is the problem that Cloaked is trying to solve? Well, the answer is, we’re trying to create what we call comfort. It’s that cognitive point which — everybody understands this problem. It’s that moment, whether you’re a VP of engineering, or my own mother, it’s when you ask somebody for their name, email, phone number, credit card address, everyone starts to get that privacy is missing. And so we’ve started at that moment and said, How do we solve that and then keep working our way towards this idea of making people feel safe, not spammed and annoyed, not tracked wherever they go.

 

Jodi Daniels  8:45  

Can you help share a little bit more. How does it work? And you emphasize a little bit of the concern that people are starting to have. So it’s kind of the Why do I need to cloak my identity? And then, how do you actually do that?

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  9:01  

For sure. I think when it comes down to it, why cloaking identity? We didn’t know some fun aspects of this, but if you check out in our website, you can enter your phone number and realize there’s so much data tied to you from just one data point, that number that you’ve had maybe for your whole life, or at one or two, and that ties back to you, your personal information, your family’s information, passwords, emails, finances, all this with the same information you give both to the IRS and Domino’s. So what we’ve kind of uncovered is that we are able to find a way to delete the past or clean up the past and protect the future. That’s really what we’re trying to do, and how we approach that is that fundamentally, we can clean and scrub your information online from data brokers, websites, social networks, things that are putting your information out there. We can start taking on kind of a spam scam, phishing, so things that are hitting you and. Either bothering you or knowing you or actually targeting could financially compromise you, and then, as AI is coming, it’s making it worse then to now, actually the cloaking identity, which the why we talk about cloaking identity, is that because your one data point or phone number email can uncover everything about you. We talk about, well, you should have unique versions of yourself, a unique email, phone number, password and zoom even credit card for Amazon. Unique email, phone or password for Uber, phone number for that cute guy at the bar, a unique email for a realtor, if we can make it simple enough, and which is what we’ve been continuously working on, it starts to make your life a lot more in your control. Makes it also a little easier to manage, as opposed to having one massive inbox for everything, organizing your shopping behavior, your travel communications with different people, it becomes part privacy, part organization. And I think that’s kind of where this whole industry is starting to head, is that if you can create value alongside privacy, people want to be private 100% of the time. There’s a little bit about how Cloaked works and Cloaked works and kind of why we’re coming about it. But hopefully that helps.And Abhijay, anything you want to add?

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  11:07  

Yeah, I think there’s a sort of a broader theme as well. Speaking about data, speaking about privacy, it fits into this idea that people have a pretty I think it’s pretty fair to say people have a fractioned relationship with technology, the companies behind them, the industry behind them, the economics, there’s a lot of distrust. I think part of the mission of which privacy is a core bedrock, is, how can we prepare the trust between people and the technology they use? So a lot of it comes down to repairing the past, present and future. A lot of it comes down to what are the services you use, or the technologies you interact with, and where we go, where we are now, versus where we’re going to the future, sort of all tackle problems in this realm.

 

Justin Daniels  11:48  

So when I was on your website, and I know you’ve got features and you have things in development, one thing that really caught my attention was this thought around AI defense, and I was wondering, if you talk a little bit about what exactly is that, and when might we see that?

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  12:06  

Yeah, so I think AI defends something that we’ve been wanting to start talking about and concept and get people to realize AI is inevitable. Now we’re seeing it in our lives. It’s part of everything, investments, dollars, companies, everyone trying to make this really part of our everyday behavior. Now, there’s the good in the workforce and the work we do. There’s also the malicious actors, as we’ve learned about, people who’ve sent wires by accident to the wrong parties, who’ve been scammers officials. We see people pretending to be family members or loved ones trying to call compromise connected individuals. We know that there’s deep fakes, there’s pictures, there’s now a lot of ways that compromise individuals. So we want to start taking that bit by bit and seeing how we make value for the individual? So today, for example, in Cloaked you right now, you can actually spin up as many numbers, if you’d like, you can make a number for every person. So you can imagine, for your two, or between close family or friends, you could spin up a number that’s unique to just YouTube. Only you two can call text. Maybe for your own bank, you could make a number only the bank knows just between you two, and this allows for trusted communication. You know, the person calling, texting, messaging, is only in that, is only that part of you that gave it to this type of idea starts to think about what are trusted relationship as a whole. And for building off of there, we want to expand into, how do we detect, monitor, prevent, and even obfuscate AI temps in your life, and so that’s really kind of thematically where AI defense is headed. There’s a lot of stuff to come, but even today we’re starting to talk about and highlight here are the tools to make you feel better, especially in sensitive conversations between parties.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  13:55  

Yeah, I think Arjun touched upon this point, but some more. A narrative to follow, really is a lot of what we’re doing right now is controlling the rails, the data that’s created, and sort of searching, identifying and and trying to remove content about you both regularly produce like regularly put out, as well as like content generated. I think the next interesting topic that we’re doing, R&D into and hopefully releasing early next year, early to mid is this idea? Well, there’s a lot of great research in how you can poison the data you have before you put it out there. One is poisoning just broad data about identifiers. But another thing is, you can actually take images, videos, whatever it is, and do some small mathematical perturbations that make these AI systems significantly were set, understanding them, detecting them, generating based off of them, doing deep fakes, and to further ones that get out there, it’s important to see if you can find them and remove them. We’re doing a lot of work with the Cloaked family, because we think a lot of the biggest vectors are actually the close network around you. So there’s a lot of thoughts on how can we build a network within your family of understanding these threat vectors beforehand, perhaps simulating them, and seeing if we can get people to train themselves mental model to prepare for what is an unknown situation. What happens if you get a phone call, Jodi, of Justin calling you? What are you gonna respond to if you don’t fully know if it’s them. We have some work in the family side, seeing how we can proactively rebuild habits there.

 

Jodi Daniels  15:27  

One of the common complaints people have nowadays is they can’t remember their passwords to anything. How do you help if I have a number for each different person, how is it so that it is easy for me to be able to remember, well, wait, Which number did I give to which person, or which email did I give to which

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  15:47  

company? And I think you kind of said, gave away the answers part of it, there’s been good mental models that have been built out, like password managers, for example, where you have a password for every account. People already know how to interface, find, search, etc, so we’ve tapped into Cloaked is also a password manager, so you can always look up find and when you’re in a form field trying to log in your the email, the phone numbers, the passwords, can all pop up right then and there, but in the actual text, calls, emails, that’s a big thing we wanted to focus on. That’s why he builds a lot of work here at Cloaked, where you can actually route your text right to your iMessage. You can route calls right to your phone. Emails can go right to your Gmail, and you can always reply, send CC, text back, always, or answer the call, and it’ll show up as your Cloaked version of yourself. But you can keep using the existing stuff. You’ve got a lot of our people in our space and companies have done really good work. They often require both parties to have the app. You can think of some famous encrypted chat apps that you may know about those often require both parties having the app digital chat, and that’s really difficult, because then you’re not getting everyone you know to go ahead and engage. So we want to make sure Cloaked would work with the stuff you’ve got today. We don’t want to change that behavior. So you always have a way to look things up, but also a way to engage without having to change what you do day to day.

 

Jodi Daniels  17:14  

That makes sense. It’s all about trying to make it work for people, because I just know how challenging it is right now to figure out even email, lots of people will create multiple different emails, but they don’t know which one they gave to whom, and being able to help solve that makes a lot of sense.

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  17:29  

I think the ideas that we would think privacy should work with you and almost for you, not in a way where you have to do a million things just to have some semblance of control.

 

Justin Daniels  17:40  

So another thing when I was out learning a little more about your company was I wanted to understand a little bit about, a little bit better about, how does Cloaked secure your data using a silo database? Because I know that is around well, you know, preparing yourselves if someone tries to access or a breach, how you’re mitigating that. So could you elaborate for audience a little bit more about what that’s

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  18:02  

about. Yeah, and Abhijay, feel free to add on to things I say here. But really, the core aspect of Cloaked is what happens if Cloaked — knock on wood — is breached, or what happens when people are putting all this information in Cloaked? Well, that’s a big thing we want to first. That’s the first thing we worked on as a business. Was that making sure that type of conversation isn’t that we can easily have. Well, something may happen to Cloaked, but how to not compromise the user? So how we built Cloaked, fundamentally, is that arc, the architecture Cloaked, we have our own infrastructure, our own database. All Data power and Cloaked, but all the users personal information, their data is separate from our own infrastructure. We have basically a unique database spun up for every single user. That’s part of our vision that you should truly own your own data. So in our system, it’s just a pointer to where your data lives, and that theoretically could be anywhere. It could be self hosted, could be your own home. It could be your phone. Now we want to make it such a user can move that data, and that’s on our road map. But the idea is it’s your data to begin with. We want to make sure it’s yours. We’re here to facilitate and help move the data where you want it to go, and help protect you with the emails, phones, cards, et cetera, that stand in front of that data wherever you’re transacting or signing up or communicating, and so that kind of relationship is how it worked, and obviously talking about security around multi vector attacks, and why this important, but there’s also a meaning to this, because when you make it such that this way now to compromise a user, you have to hack Cloaked and every user separately, as opposed to, we know, a famous password manager that got breached, where they have everything about someone in one system, which leads to compromising everything about the individual. I don’t know if I wish you anything about that.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  19:49  

Last point is really important is that the keys are in the customer’s hands, and the data is not like the data storage itself is not accessible to us without the customer or. Consent and customer actually providing keys, and then all the data, everything about it, it’s all about the customer having what they have locally. Yeah, it’s not just consent based, yeah, if they have to put their password or derive from the password to access any data, and if we don’t have that, then we can’t really either decrypt or see any of this information.

 

Jodi Daniels  20:20  

Now I know we want everyone here to go and upload the count at the same time, there are other wonderful privacy and security measures that people can be taking. So what would you offer to someone as a privacy or security tip, aside from what we’ve been talking about here today,

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  20:44  

I think I’m thinking of anything of your side. I have one tip I always say is that just say no, everything from websites to account signups to permissions, they all adapt. When you give less permissions and less data, you don’t have to give up everything about yourself to engage meaningfully on any technology. So if you take that mindset of not hitting Okay, or allow all to access everything about you, that will make a meaningful start in this whole idea of what security, privacy, what does this all look like because the big thing to highlight why that’s important. You might think my bank account is safe, but if a hack or a malicious person wants to attack you, they’re not going to attack your bank right away. They’ll attack that website you bought a t-shirt from, but you gave the same information you signed up with your bank account to that t-shirt company. And so the idea is that your information is really easily found from downloaded places that invest in security differently. So it’s important to make sure you don’t give up everything wherever you’re going. And you can start that today, because everyone’s looking for the latest information. So you can actually turn down that faucet pretty quickly.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  22:00  

Yeah, I think echoing some of his points, one with the “no” thing we see privacy’s mental model very similar to sort of affirmative consent in relationships. You know, there’s a five pillars, revocable, conscious, enthusiastic, verbal, ongoing, I think we should really take a very sensitive mental model to yourselves on how you view the relationships around you, because there’s a very blurred line between physical relationships and digital relationships, and like the digital world and the physical world the way we are right now, I think personal privacy tip, great question. I think everything we want to do we try to build into our own software. But separate from that, I think there’s a lot of technology you want to use out there that’s sort of out of our domain, or anything like that. And for almost any technology you want to use, there’s probably a different version that does basically the same thing but doesn’t have a business model generated around, you know, selling your data to brokers or ad providers.

 

Jodi Daniels  23:01  

Those are good tips. Lots of people don’t want their data sold.

 

Justin Daniels  23:06  

So when you’re not building Cloaked, what do the two of you like to do for fun?

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  23:13  

I am a big pickleball player. I’ve been now, I always grew up in love with tennis. Now, my kind of blowing off steam has been pickleball with some friends. That’s been one thing. But I think friends or kind of also just resting, seeing traveling. I love photography, taking photos, these tend to be my kind of de-stressors and outlets. But really love getting physical activity as much as I can, and then also just going out for walks and exploring and taking photos by mangle too.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  23:46  

I used to be pretty athletic, wrestling, rock climbing, that kind of stuff. I tore my shoulder. So now I’m sort of semi-retired, and in my crafts era, so I’m definitely learning how to paint, no music, all that kind of stuff. Not as good as light to be, but getting better every day. I also have two cats, and I spend basically all of my evenings with my cats. And I’m a very proud cat dad.

 

Jodi Daniels  24:10  

I love the cat, dad, and you have a pickleball friend indeed.

 

Justin Daniels  24:13  

Yes, I’m a squash player who plays pickleball in my free time. It’s easier to do. Courts are everywhere, but they’re packed.

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  24:21  

Absolutely and, of course, everywhere. But I grew up and played tennis very seriously. But the challenge of tennis and sounds, probably even squash, is that you got to find someone who’s evenly, say, similar levels. You got to book a chord. And takes a lot of time to pick up all you can grab your friend, your aunt. Doesn’t matter. People can pick up pretty quickly.

 

Justin Daniels  24:40  

I think that’s the key to its popularity, is the ease of playing it. Yeah? Absolutely agreed.

 

Jodi Daniels  24:47  

Well, listeners, if you are also a pick a ball player, here’s some more friends. If you go to any of these cities, you can play too. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about Cloaked? Yeah?

 

Arjun Bhatnagar  24:59  

Um. Tommy, if you make a Cloaked number on the spot while I tell people, but you can go to Cloaked.com, and you can definitely do a free phone scan, or sign up directly for Cloaked right then there. And the phone scanner, we always say, recommends something interesting. See how much information is available about you from just your phone number. Or you can make an account to get started and explore everything about Cloaked Password Manager, the masking, data deletion, identity theft insurance, all in one as a solution. And what I asked obviously, to do is kind of show you Cloaked in action, if you want to reach obviously, directly, can give you a Cloaked number, just for the audience.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  25:36  

Sure. Yeah, there’s a number I’ve created for you guys. 609-812-2769, he called that number. It’ll reach me, text me, call me, VP, whatever. At least until I decide to turn it off and or mute it.

 

Jodi Daniels  25:53  

We’ll give it a little bit of time so people can catch up and, you know, all their holiday podcasts. So I wrote the number down. It’ll be in the show notes as well, and everyone can test out clipped see how it works. We’re so grateful that you joined us today.

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  26:09  

Yeah, for the friendlier people. We do have an office in New York, you know, reach us. Talk to us. We’re pretty receptive. We like to have people come in and out.

 

Jodi Daniels  26:19  

There you go and pickle ball and pickleball friendly chat and pickle ball, it’s the dream come true. Well, thank you again. We really appreciate it,

 

Abhijay Bhatnagar  26:29  

Of course, thanks for having us.

 

Outro  26:35  

Thanks for listening to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast. If you haven’t already be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time.