How does Edison build privacy focused products?

We build privacy focused products by enforcing strict rules on our algorithms, and by using research as a source of revenue. Edison's AI algorithms are designed to ignore all non-commercial emails from the start. The technology used for the aggregated research only pays attention (or matches patterns) to the receipts listed in the Edison Mail app's Assistant categories — subscriptions, travel, packages, bills & receipts, and entertainment. It doesn’t recognize and therefore doesn’t pay attention to any other types of emails — especially not freeform personal ones. The Edison API is also this way through design. The Edison team has developed strict categorization rules to prevent accidents.

These rules have only been strengthened by consumers. Those who have signed up for the Edison Mail beta programs have always been vocal about any missed packages, trips, bills, and entertainment receipts. Through these complaints over the past decade, the Edison team has been able to train and retrain our software to only identify and extract relevant information only from those commercial emails that help measure market trends. This Edison API is also available for other companies to use here.

Edison is different from traditional data brokers, because everything is truly anonymized — all personally identifying information is removed, and we only sell, provide or allow aggregate research reports.

The beauty about research as a business model is that you as an individual don’t matter. It’s important to remember that unlike other businesses, Edison wants to get rid of personally identifying information in your commercial emails, not only because user privacy is important, but also because the companies we create market insights for don’t want to know about people on an individual level, but rather observe the way consumer demand is shifting. So no personally identifying information is ever shared. This differs from ad-based models that want to know your personal purchasing patterns to influence and change your decisions.

Edison Trends data is only allowed for aggregated research, and cannot be traced back to the individual user. To read more of the kind of research Edison Trends does, check out the research blog here.