Arjun Bhatnagar

CEO at @keepitcloaked building the future of consumer privacy. I tweet about tech, startups, investing, and a repeat of a joke you probably told me.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

Ghosting doesn't work with your real phone number 👻

Let ME end your situationship - just give them my @keepitcloaked number: 219-200-1801

I've got your back!

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

Is Jira down? Tickets seem to be broken across the board. @Atlassian @Jira

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@CyberJMC66 @keepitcloaked I'm so sorry, we had a brief outage at the time, but things are back to normal. Happy to still process a cancellation if you don't want to give it a try!

[Moxie Marlinspike @moxie]

I didn’t go to college, but I did once unexpectedly end up at Princeton University’s “reunions weekend.”

The way they do it, every 5th year class has their reunion on campus at the same time. So every year, on one weekend, the Princeton campus will be filled with people celebrating their 5th, 10th, 15th, and so on class reunions— all the way up until there’s nobody alive anymore.

The beginning of reunions weekend kicks off with a parade! It is a parade of the Princeton graduates: featuring themselves, in honor of themselves, for… themselves.

It works like this: all the graduates pack the sidewalks of the parade route, but ordered by graduation year. The recent graduates are standing at the end of the route, and the oldest graduates are at the beginning.

Then, the parade begins. The oldest living graduate steps off the sidewalk and leads the parade. When everyone older than you has gone by, you step into the street and become the parade. Until you become part of the parade, you’re cheering the parade. You cheer and witness everyone before you, and then you are cheered and witnessed by everyone after you.

It is a bizarre ritual. To see it, though, is like seeing the entire fossil record of Princeton graduates. The person leading the parade — the oldest living graduate in that cohort — is a white guy. And then, for a reallllly lonnnnnng time, it’s just white guys!

After 30 minutes… a woman! A white woman. With people in the parade maybe holding signs like “first coed graduating class!”

And then another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more white women in the parade. And then… the first black man! Another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more black men. And so on.

By the end — the most recent class — is the exact opposite of the beginning. A mix of everyone you can think of.

For some reason that parade really stuck with me. It’s simultaneously a representation of how much the world has changed, but also a representation of how many “minutes of parade” are still walking around having lived and ended up where they are under very different circumstances.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

5 years ago Abhijay and I bet that privacy & security would be the biggest question in an age of AI.

Today, Cloaked raised $375M to take that challenge on and help individuals, businesses, and the world fight back against data parasites.

Back to work! @keepitcloaked

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@brianrumao @nextplayVC Thank you so much!! Really appreciate you being a supporter from the very beginning.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@bznotes @keepitcloaked So happy to call you a friend and a mentor on this journey! It's been a lot of fun and we're just getting started.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@iAnonymous3000 - really great to connect and appreciate that you’re on cloaked. You understand our mission and I definitely took back your feedback.

Quick thoughts to ensure we're clear on your notes because we definitely are on the same side here.

Section 3.4 applies to Intellectual Property Rights. Its stating that feedback, ideas, or random comments sent to us, including via "email," do not give IP rights to that person. For example, if you emailed me an idea on Cloaking Addresses, and we were already building Cloaked Addresses, you don't have IP rights in Cloaked Addresses. This is not speaking to user emails or information - which is e2e encrypted, in each user's separate database.

Section 3.5 speaks to protecting Cloaked for processing payment transaction information that you provided - the Your Information definition. For example, if you give us information to ACH a bank account, and you get a NSF fee, we want to protect Cloaked from blowback. True that legal is a stickler here, but wants to protect us, as you can imagine. This does not grant rights, but protects Cloaked for unencrypted information you provided, usually via third party, for account payment.

You’re right, we partner with PureVPN, which we wanted to disclose in our docs while we’re putting finishing touches on our grassroots VPN efforts. More to come soon there!

Rising tides here, and appreciate everything. We also have partnered with @brave many times in the past, and look forward to doing so again in the future.

Always welcome to chat!

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@nikitabier Already happening, and accelerating. We built Cloaked for exactly this. My phone number is fully masked, and Cloaked screens every call. It's the only way I stay reachable.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@missmayn Spot on.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@EthanHe_42 @keepitcloaked

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

Europe should be ashamed of what it did to iRobot.

https://t.co/kgm1QTs4iC

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

I can't believe @GetSpectrum requires a phone call to cancel and when calling it has a 45 min wait and no callback option.

This feels like it should be breaking some laws.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@thought_sync @compliantvc Makes sense, need a permit to work on a Saturday.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

I think the end result of sharing your data is that you feel Known, not Surveilled. Personalized, not Compromised. The delta here is massive.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

Alternatives create monopolies.

Google cites Mozilla as proof competition exists.

Meanwhile 3.5B people use Chrome

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

Recently, my father asked me for one piece of privacy advice he could actually follow.

I said:

“Just say No.”

When someone asks for his data, default to no.

- Restaurant asks for your phone number? "No thanks."
- App wants access to your contacts? No.
- TSA wants to scan your face? No. (Yes, you can legally say this. They'll scan your ID instead. Same result, no time difference.)
- Website wants to track you across the internet? No.

But people are terrified of saying no.
They think something will break. They think they'll get in trouble. They think they'll miss out on something important.
Here's what actually happens: nothing.

I've been testing this for years:
- Google Maps works fine in airplane mode (it pre-calculates your route)
- Most apps function perfectly without contact access
- Restaurants still seat you without your phone number
- You still get through airport security

People don’t realize that most data collection is optional. Companies just make it feel mandatory through dark patterns and intimidating UX.

So, recently my father tried saying “no.” He said no to the grocery store loyalty program signup. No to the gas station app. No to the restaurant feedback survey.

Everything worked exactly the same.

Start with no. Then decide what deserves a yes.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is that privacy alternatives actually hurt… privacy.

A few reasons:

1) They give Big Tech perfect cover. Google points to Firefox and says "see, there are alternatives!" Meta points to Signal. It's like having one small organic farm in rural Iowa so Monsanto can claim the market has choice.

2) They normalize surveillance as the default. By creating separate privacy-focused tools, we're implicitly accepting that the main tools should be surveillance-heavy. We're fighting for scraps instead of changing the rules.

3) They require too much sacrifice. People didn't switch to TikTok because it was more private—they switched because it was more fun. Privacy alternatives that make you give up convenience will always lose.

4) They make privacy seem like a fringe concern. When only 150M people use Firefox vs 3.5B on Chrome, it signals that privacy is a niche issue for paranoid techies, not a mainstream concern.

5) They let the main platforms off the hook. Instead of pressuring Instagram to be better, we tell people to use alternatives. This removes any incentive for the big platforms to actually change.

***

I think the real solution is to stop telling people to abandon the tools they love. Start giving them control over how those tools use their data.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@durov It's why a lot of us are doing something about it.

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

@TheIshanGoswami maybe the real ARR is the friends we made along the way :’)

[Arjun Bhatnagar @acenario]

"Nobody cares about privacy."
= the biggest lie in tech.

People care. They just don't know what to do about it.

Evidence:
- They use Snapchat instead of giving out phone numbers
- They stopped using "Sign in with Facebook"
- They're scared of AI knowing everything about them

They don't scream "I want digital privacy." But watch their behavior.