Partnered With:

Arkham accused of privacy breach: establishing an anonymous human flesh market? Founder involved with CIA?

Read this article in 10 Minutes

Arkham investors include founders of Palantir and OpenAI.

Original title: "Arkham accused of leaking privacy: establishing an anonymous human flesh market? Founder has ties with CIA?"

Original source: Deep Tide

On July 10th, the previously unknown blockchain on-chain monitoring platform Arkham became well-known due to the news of "Binance Launchpad will launch Arkham".

Immediately, everyone began to search for the private messages that Arkham had sent in their Twitter DMs, inviting them to use their product. Amidst the excitement, various registration invitation links quickly filled the social space.

Currently, Arkham still adopts an invitation registration system. However, it is also this invitation link that has put Arkham in the center of public opinion.

A netizen found that Arkham's referral link seems to have leaked users' email addresses.

Because Arkham uses Base-64 encoding to generate personalized recommendation links. Therefore, if you have a recommendation link, you can decode the Base-64 hash value and obtain any user's email.

Arkham also states in their privacy policy statement during registration that they may use email for direct marketing, interest-based advertising, sharing information with third-party platforms and social media networks.

Previously, a user named Matsumoto had privately messaged Arkham with this question and received the response, "Yes, we know."

In the Western world of encryption where privacy breaches are considered taboo, a Mars-like fury seems to have ignited, with more criticism pouring in.

A well-known crypto KOL, Adam Cochran, who participated in the construction of SNX/YFI, expressed his anger that "Arkham also sniffs and records user data, including their bound wallet addresses, device IDs, locations, etc. Then, they mix it with public data that has been deleted from public sources (such as Twitter) if you share a link. It's free because you are the product."

On the relevant privacy details page, Arkham states that the following information will be collected: account and contact data; interests, usage and links; marketing data; communication data; transaction data; blockchain addresses; third-party information sources; device data; online activity information...

Arkham 搜集如此多数据信息究竟要干嘛？

Arkham is collecting so much data, what exactly are they going to do with it?

Everyone immediately thinks of the upcoming on-chain intelligence trading platform, Arkham Intel Exchange, when they hear about Arkham. It allows users to anonymously buy and sell information about wallet address owners. Buyers can publish information requests through bounties, and sellers can obtain rewards by submitting the required intelligence.

The exposure is not limited to Arkham itself, and its founder Miguel Morel is also implicated, linking him to the CIA.

Angry netizens found a video of showing off wealth titled "How much did he spend?!!!" In the video, Miguel Morel was described as "the god of damn cryptocurrency" and spent 2,500 pounds on sunglasses.

Additionally, people discovered on his LinkedIn profile that Miguel Morel's interests include the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States.

Meanwhile, in its company description, they wrote that their investors include the founders of Palantir and OpenAI.

Most people may not be familiar with Palantir, which is hailed as the most mysterious big data analytics company in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, and his Stanford University classmates Alex Karp and software engineer Stephen Cohen.

They hope to use the human-machine collaborative mode of the Paypal security authentication system to identify criminals such as terrorists and financial fraudsters, and create a software company that helps people extract useful information from different sources. This idea coincides with the needs of the US government, so shortly after its establishment, Palantir's first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency.

Even netizens have pointed out that Arkham's logo resembles that of the Pentagon, so we should not underestimate the associative abilities of angry netizens.

However, under numerous accusations and pressure, Arkham seems to have started to compromise.

Arkham CEO Miguel Morel responded on social media, stating that "the system was created at the beginning of the beta test to track user recommendations via email in order to reward users. In addition to communicating with users and tracking recommendations, we will not use them for any other purpose. All future referral links will include an encrypted version of the referrer's email, making it impossible to reverse engineer. This change has already taken effect."

However, the seeds of doubt have been sown, and repairing the damage is proving to be even more difficult. "The reason it's free is because you are the product," and labels such as "anonymous human flesh market" have made Arkham a target of public criticism.

Undeniably, Arkham is an excellent on-chain monitoring and analysis platform, but the value of "privacy" needs to be re-examined.

Someone commented, "Although people are currently criticizing Arkham, they will still call it their daddy if it makes them money."

So the question is, does the blockchain need privacy? Or is it enough to just make money?