For years, the internet's biggest players have hoarded your personal data and sold it for billions. Now, a band of angry startups is demanding privacy and aiming to overhaul the social-media business forever.
There's a lot you won't learn about Nico Sell in the course of this story. You won't learn how to follow her on Twitter or Instagram or Vine. You won't learn her age, or where she lives, exactly, or the year she graduated from Dartmouth. You won't find out the names of her two girls or her husband's name or whether hers is Nico Sell at all. You won't even really see her face (she is prone to fedoras and dark glasses when there's a camera around). The woman is careful, or "properly paranoid," as she puts it. "You give people 10 data points about you and they can steal your identity," she says. "It's really pretty simple."
Sell is the co-founder and CEO of
Wickr, which makes what the company says is an all-but-unhackable mobile messaging app. A pleasantly raucous blonde who would look right at home on a Harley, Sell says she's a "venture catalyst" in no fewer than 20 successful security companies. Wickr itself raised more than $9 million in March in a round led by Gilman Louie of Alsop Louie Partners (he's also the founder and former CEO of the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel). Other investors included Juniper Networks; the Knight Foundation; a prominent counterterrorism adviser under Bill "¨Clinton and both George Bushes; and the founder of DEF CON, one of the world's largest hacker gatherings. Sell has been part of DEF CON for "well over a decade," serving as the group's liaison with federal agencies looking to cooperate with white-hat hackers.
Sell, in other words, has seen the pale, sweaty underbelly of the Internet. She started Wickr to give her daughters a tool that would allow them to communicate safely, anonymously, with the capacity to control what information is retained on the other end. "If my 4-year-old can't use a button," she says, "we don't push it out."
In April, a Wired article on "The Rise of Chat Apps" relegated Wickr to a footnote, calling it an app for "an NSA-weary public and drug dealers." And the sudden popularity of these "ephemeral chat" tools--Privatext, TigerText, "¨Whisper, Mark Cuban's Cyber Dust, the list goes on--is "¨often explained as a consequence of Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations about the NSA's global surveillance programs. But Wickr, which was founded in 2011, has much bigger ambitions than helping people avoid the NSA: Sell wants to obliterate the business model on which the world's most powerful tech companies depend.
Sell is part of an idealistic but ambitious movement in Silicon Valley looking to flip the switch on how we live and share and do business online. These entrepreneurs see the status quo--in which users have signed away the rights to their data and online existence to Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and a few other supremely powerful companies--as not just a violation of privacy but also as fatal to innovation. "We all assumed our data was private, and now we're realizing that it's not, and we're doing something about it--as a culture, as a society," says Brian Blau, Gartner Group's research director covering social networks. "I'm seeing this all over the place. The pendulum is swinging," he says, adding that he is in the middle of a project tentatively called "Power to the People." "If people demand better privacy controls, then the natural outcome is that they're going to want more control of their data, and eventually they'll realize their data has value. I think there's a big business there."
This sector is only just emerging, but Sell certainly sees the potential. "I want [Wickr] to replace Facebook and Skype--simultaneously," she says. And she isn't kidding. "We're hoping to create an entire marketplace and have thousands of apps running off Wickr software."
