Is Your Secret Santa App on the Privacy Naughty List?

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. It's a busy time to run a Secret Santa site. For Elfster, one such site, the normal staff of around 20 elves (yes, they call themselves elves) balloons to a team of about 55. "We need a million servers, we need tons of support people--it's just off the hook for the holidays," Peter Imburg, the company's CEO, told me recently on Zoom. More than 21 million people have used Elfster for exchanges, and Imburg said the biggest group he's seen participate in an exchange on the platform was about 5,000 people. Imburg started Elfster in 2004 (the time of Friendster and Napster, hence the name) as a way to solve a personal problem: How to coordinate a family gift exchange when not everyone was in the same place, and with certain conditions, like not selecting yourself or your spouse?