Entities and identifiers
What an entity is, how it differs from a signal, and how Watt exposes identifiers and their compliance flags.
An entity is a noun — a person, a place, a thing. Every entity is universally unique and comes with one or more identifiers. Identifiers are the handles that point at it: an email address, phone number, postal address, or business domain. A signal, by contrast, is a single field that changes over time and describes one or more entities.
Entities vs. signals
Take the signal has_dog. At any given moment it might describe, say, 10 million people. Each time it refreshes, some of those people still have a dog, some no longer do, and new ones appear. The entity — the person — is stable and uniquely identified; the signal is a time-varying field layered across many entities. The graph holds both: durable entities, and the signals that wash across them.
Today Watt indexes two entity types — people and businesses. We're new; expect that to grow to hundreds, even thousands, of entity types in the coming months.
Identifiers
Every entity has at least one identifier. Identifiers are how you reach or match an entity: email, phone, postal address, business domain, and so on.
Today, most identifiers Watt indexes are loosely linked — a single identifier may point to more than one person or business. Email addresses, for instance, are often shared. As with signals, the set of entities and identifiers we index grows every month.
Compliance flags and your responsibility
Unlike traditional data providers, Watt is a search index: the signals it holds — and the compliance flags attached to them — aren't ours. Every flag, like Do-Not-Call status, comes from our vendors (all legally registered data brokers), and Watt makes all of them available to you alongside the identifiers they describe.
Because Watt unifies every vendor's flags into a single layer, you see more of them than any one source would surface: if five vendors hold an opt-out flag on the same email, all five show up — even ones a given vendor didn't originally record. Aggregating this way raises the privacy floor, not lowers it.
Watt can't blanket-enforce these flags on your behalf — which laws and standards apply depends entirely on how you use the identifiers. Enforce the ones applicable to your use case. See Data handling for the full posture.