The Making of the Caden Terminal
WTF is the Caden Terminal?
The Caden Terminal is a portal into the underworld of personal data brokering. The Terminal is intended to incite conversation on the present state of personal data privacy online.
Internet actors have been quietly slurping and sleuthing in a permissionless personal privacy free-for-all. The data we reveal in the Terminal is obtained for a fraction of a penny in a fraction of a second. And we’re not even pulling the available information from the more nefarious dark web sources.
Don’t worry, all the personal data revealed based on your email address is for demonstration purposes only (i.e., we aren’t going to do anything shady with it).
Your data should belong to you. Companies shouldn’t be able to “buy” your data from shady brokers; companies should “lease” your data from you. The difference is nuanced but powerful.
Origin Story
One parlor trick we would wield when meeting with prospective team members and investors was a simple data broker API (screenshot below) that would punctuate the current broken state of personal data online.
The demo was bare-bones but consistently led to the “Huzzah!” moment where boring data privacy tech was immediately made personal. As we described the invasive nature of data brokers, then showed the demo, users inevitably uttered something along the lines of “that’s creepy.” We realized we needed to make more people aware of the problem while we get to work fixing it.
At Caden, we want to Make Everything Better and we’re building the tools required to fix the internet’s broken state of personal privacy. As you can imagine, this is quite the undertaking.
In an endeavor to recreate the huzzah moment that resonated with investors and our growing team, we created a publicly available personal data demonstration to motivate people to join our waitlist.
Crafting a Creepy (But Not Too Creepy) Experience
Without our verbal color commentary, a stark white screen with random personal data inputs would fall flat. As such, our team set out to craft a candy wrapper that was “creepy… but not too creepy.” Here are some of our early ideas:
One early idea was Zoltar — the all-knowing animatronic fortune-teller from the 1980s Tom Hanks classic Big.
Many of our Gen-Z team responded with “Zol-what,” but the endearing Tom Hanks clip left a positive feeling of 80s nostalgia. As we peeled back the layers of feasibility, we came across Zoltar.org, the Zoltar rights holder. Given the team’s mixed feedback, we decided against this route since we hit the Zoltar licensing roadblock.
Leaning into the movie nostalgia, we creatively explored a “Mirror-Mirror on the Wall” angle, paying homage to Snow White and the many movie reincarnations of the mirror-mirror mantra.
Internally, it didn’t carry as much momentum relative to the other creative explorations. We even contemplated replacing the theatrical mask with a Zuckerberg-inspired caricature, but it conveyed a slightly wrong message: the intention was to highlight the data broker industry, not Facebook.
Another creative alternative was an Omniscient Orb, which was perceived as too nebulous — perhaps because it literally looked like a nebula.
The creative option that initially received the highest mark collectively was the Caden Magic 8 Ball:
The Magic 8 ball provided a form factor that worked well on small mobile screens, where we anticipated most of our traffic. Plus, it had universal recognition and presented a nice analog for digital experiences (“Shake the 8 Ball” for opt-ins, “Pass the 8 Ball” for shares, etc.).
We mocked up a sample user journey and even started development, but then John Oliver changed everything.
Zigging with the Zeitgeist
On April 10, 2022, a TikTok FYP serendipitously surfaced a clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, highlighting data brokers’ “unsettling” practices.
John Oliver targeted politicians in Washington D.C with ads saying, “Marriage shouldn’t be a prison,” “Can you vote twice?” and “Do you want to read Ted Cruz erotic fan fiction?”
Once clicked, John Oliver used data brokers to de-anonymize the data and identified specific politicians that had expressed interest in certain blush-worthy topics.
John Oliver concluded his twenty-five-minute tell-all with, “This whole exercise was f*cking creepy.”
Within a couple of days, millions of people watched John Oliver’s crash course on personal data privacy and the controversial multi-billion dollar data brokering industry — an industry that Caden is looking to disrupt while putting the power of privacy back into the hands of the people.
Empowered by John Oliver’s creepy call-out, we decided to pivot our product and turn up the creep factor a couple of notches.
Let’s Get Creepy
As we moth-balled the Magic 8 Ball in Caden’s product attic, we re-imagined a CIA terminal that the team previously discarded.
John distilled down the creative direction to “less Bourne, more Chernobyl” — boot the 2000-era CIA dashboard from the movie Bourne Identity, and double-down on a 1980s-era terminal experience like HBO’s show, Chernobyl.
Knowing that we were up against the sharp media half-life, we worked tirelessly to craft an experience that incorporated multiple data sources encapsulated in a narrative that accounted for data variability and smoothed out potential drop-off points. We worked so tirelessly that our glitchy interface victimized us — we had to add photosensitive palette cleansing breaks to avert “Pokemon Shock.”
Within 14 days, we were ready for the Caden friends, family, and advisors to start user testing.
Release Into the Wild
Before we had even agreed upon a launch strategy, we quietly shared the Terminal with our friends, family, and financiers for feedback. Within minutes, people were messaging us with “Holy crap!!” and we had hundreds of people signing up within hours.
To provide us with an opportunity for a proper launch, we decided to put the cat back in the bag until the perennially creepy Friday, the 13th of May, 2022.
In preparation for the launch, we drafted a series of “What’s Creepier” ads based on internet creep, ranging from Slender Man to low res aliens, and anticipated future memes by remixing a movie poster image with a line from the trailer for Zac Efron’s Friday the 13th release of Firestarter.
Additionally, we cut a trailer of our own that built anticipation from a series of shock-and-awe reactions edited to give the glitchy terminal look-and-feel.
We are posting this “Making Of” article on the precipice of launch. But, it would be remiss of us not to take a moment to thank the many people who have helped us get the Caden Terminal to this point.
Special Thanks
- Milton Li
- Molly Parker
- John Roa
- Rick Astley (hint: hit “esc”)
- Vivid+Co
- Deviate Labs
About Caden
Caden is heralding a new era of the internet — the Privacy Era. Caden is a part product company, part social activist organization. The products Caden is building invert the prevailing power dynamic on the internet.
In the “open data” future of the internet that Caden is powering, you are in control of your personal data. When a trusted brand wants temporary access to your information, they lease it, but their access is removed when you want them to be done.
Caden announced its $3.4M pre-seed round earlier this year and plans to launch a beta app soon.
