What public data means, and where the boundaries are

Public data is what a platform displays to anybody who opens the page: follower counts, a video's views, the text of a comment, a venue's review score. But public does not mean you may do anything with it, and the four boundaries below are hard boundaries at CIA.

Four hard boundaries

1. No email addresses, for anybody. Including company email patterns, because those exist to guess personal addresses.

2. No personal phone numbers. Every phone field is stripped from the data, except in business directories such as Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Booking and Trustpilot. There, a phone number is a business's public line, not a person's.

3. No lists of people to contact. No lead lists, no staff lists, no decision-maker lists. Endpoints that return people are blocked at the configuration layer, so there is no way to reach them over the web or over the API.

4. No contact details for review authors or commenters. Only a display name and the text.

One more item, not personal data but the same kind of decision: CIA does not build an account status checker.

Why these boundaries work in your favour

Three practical reasons, not only principled ones:

Legal risk transfers to the user, not the tool. If a tool hands you a list of email addresses scraped from somewhere, you are the one sending the mail.

Mechanically harvested contact data is almost always poor. Emails guessed from a pattern have a high error rate, and sending to wrong addresses damages your own domain reputation.

Clear boundaries make a product stable. Tools that operate close to the line get blocked or taken down, and you lose the process you built on them.

The rights of the people described

Under Decree 13/2023/ND-CP, anyone has the right to see, correct or delete personal data about themselves. CIA has a data request page for that.

An account that has submitted a block request is refused before credits are charged, for anybody — over the web and over the API alike. Which means if a creator requests a block, nobody can run an analysis on them, including a paying customer.

See also Decree 13/2023 for marketers.

The numbers are estimates, not facts

Every figure CIA returns is an estimate from public data the platform displays. It is not a channel's internal analytics, not a marketplace's own figures, and not audited.

This matters when you report to a client: put that sentence in the report. It protects you when the client compares against creator-supplied numbers and finds a gap.

Frequently asked questions

May public data be used commercially? It depends on the data type and on platform terms. This article is not legal advice; for a specific situation, ask a lawyer.

Why not find emails when other tools do? See why we do not find email addresses.

Can I get private data if I have a legitimate reason? No. The boundary is at the configuration layer, not in an acceptable-use policy.