Why this tool does not find emails or phone numbers

This gets asked often, so here is the straight answer: CIA does not find email addresses, does not find personal phone numbers, and has no endpoint that returns a list of people to contact. Other tools do that. Here is why we do not, and what you can do instead.

Three reasons

1. Legal risk transfers to you. If a tool hands you a list of email addresses, you are the one sending the mail, and under Decree 13/2023/ND-CP you are the one responsible. The tool sells the data and disappears from the problem. See Decree 13/2023 for marketers.

2. Mechanically harvested contact data is almost always poor. Emails guessed from a company pattern have a high error rate. Sending to wrong addresses raises bounce rates and damages your own domain reputation — and that damage outlasts the benefit of a list.

3. A product operating close to the line is not durable. Tools relying on endpoints that return people get blocked, and when they are blocked the process you built on them dies. A clear boundary makes a product stable, and that favours long-term users.

Reason two is the one nobody mentions and the most practical.

What to do instead

For creators. Most creators have a public contact route they published themselves: the channel bio, a link in the profile, or a messaging handle. Your job is knowing who to approach, and that is what analytical data does: see finding creators by niche keyword and Creators & KOLs.

For businesses. A business's phone number and address on Google Maps are public and CIA keeps them, because that is a business line rather than a person's. See Google Maps reviews.

For commenters and review authors. Only a display name and the text. What you can do is group analysis: what they complain about, what they ask, who they compare against. That is usually what you actually need. See grouping comments into themes.

When you should use a different tool

If your job genuinely is finding individuals' contact details, CIA is not the tool for it and will not become one. Saying so plainly saves you time.

But check one thing first: do you need to contact someone, or to know who to contact? Most people asking about emails actually have the second problem, and analytical data solves that.

This boundary is configuration, not policy

Endpoints returning people are blocked at the configuration layer, so there is no way to reach them — over the web, over the API, or otherwise. There is no exception for a legitimate reason, because there is no mechanism to make an exception.

Frequently asked questions

Will this ever be added? No. It is in the product's hard-boundary set.

What about a venue's phone number on Google Maps? Kept, because it is the business's own public line.

How do I delete data about myself? Submit a request at the data request page.