TalentLayer Partners with iExec on Privacy-Preserving Email Marketing Tools for Hiring Platforms
Maintain Privacy While Reaching Your Users
At TalentLayer, we’re creating a better way of working. To achieve this, we’ve re-thought the tech stack for work from the ground up. TalentLayer is a low-level open data ecosystem and transaction layer where users own their reputations, anyone can work with anyone, and builders can grow profitable businesses helping parties connect. In the long-run, this network will be a unifying layer that exists below all hiring applications.
Our tech needs to be exceptionally accessible to builders and end users in order to achieve our vision. This is easier said than done.
We’re using blockchain technology to enable peer to peer network effects without an intermediary, and to allow users to act with full ownership for their data. What we’re building wouldn’t be possible without blockchain. While this new technology enables systems that weren’t possible only years before, it also comes with it’s challenges; namely around user experience and privacy.
User experience vs user autonomy & privacy
So far, in enterprise-grade and mainstream consumer facing applications of blockchain technology, we’ve seen that user experience and user autonomy/privacy have become polarizing goals; it seems like you can’t have both.
One of the best examples of this is how we handle communications with users.
How many times have you given your personal email to a decentralized social media, centralized wallet, web 3 hiring platform, or others?
By gathering user emails directly, platforms…
- Inadvertently dox their users 😠
- Incentivize users to provide fake or burner emails to protect their privacy (meaning messages don’t get read by users) 💀
- Cause regulatory headaches — by collecting personal identifiable information, they have to comply with GDPR and similar laws on handling user data 🏛
The reason that these projects need to gather emails is because, today, email remains the most reliable way to reach users.
At TalentLayer, every platform that is building hiring tech using our toolkit needs reliable ways to talk with users regarding…
- Alerts on open job postings
- Alerts on job progress and applications
- Payment alerts
- Promotions
That’s why we’ve had the following question for a while.
“How can you reliably send emails to users without revealing the email address of the user”?
Can we send emails without knowing people’s emails? ✉️
What if there was a way to make sure an email alert gets to a user without your team having to know a user’s email.
This is the challenge that the iExec team set out to solve earlier this year.
iExec is a decentralized compute network that been privacy-focused from day 1 — leveraging confidential computing techniques to enable private data to be processed on untrusted remote servers.
The team at iExec developed a tool enabling private email sending leveraging their technology — Web3 Mail.
Web3 Mail enables…
⭐ Platforms to send emails to users while only knowing a user’s public wallet address
- Platforms can also enable their own users to send emails to one another, without the users knowing each others email addresses
⭐ Users to control who can email them and on what terms
- They can “allow” and “disallow” certain senders or demographics of senders (i.e. “I want to only receive outreach from platforms I’ve posted jobs on” or “I want to only receive outreach from hirers who have paid other freelancers successfully”)
- They can put up configurable paywalls (i.e. “If someone wants to email me, charge them $0.05 per email” or “If someone wants to email me charge them $0.50 per email, except if the user is a member of Developer DAO”
TalentLayer x Web3 Mail proof of concept
TalentLayer is partnering with iExec to build one of the first implementations of Web3 mail.
The scope of the implementation is to integrate web3 email directly into our open-source starter frontend; StarterKit. This frontend serves as starting point for many platforms building on TalentLayer.
The development of this project will be done on the iExec Sidechain (also known as the Bellecour blockchain) — where they’ve developed the beta version of Web3 Mail. To build our proof of concept there, we’ll be deploying a development-only version of TalentLayer’s contracts to the iExec Sidechain.
Mainstream user experience, build from principles first
We’re building the tools today that the world will use tomorrow. We have the ability to radically rethink how systems work from a principles first-standpoint.
How do we preserve user privacy?
How do we ensure users have full autonomy over their profiles and data?
We don’t have to sacrifice usability of our platforms to uphold these principles.
We’re super excited to work with the iExec team to explore more tools to help platforms, hirers, and workers connect in privacy-preserving ways.
