Frederick Ghahramani is a Canadian businessperson.[1]
Education
Frederick Ghahramani studied electronics engineering at
Simon Fraser University.[2][3] In 2001, Ghahramani was awarded the BMO Bank of Montreal First Place Prize in the New Ventures B.C. Competition.[4][5] In 2005, he then received the Business Development Bank of Canada's Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.[6][7]
Career
Ghahramani is the founder and Managing Director of
airG Inc.,[8] a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver.[9] He formed the company in April 2000 with his university classmates Bryce Pasechnik and Vincent Yen.[3] Gharamani was also the founder of Just10, an advertising-free private social network where users are limited to having just 10 friends, and all content, posts, and messages are strictly private, and are permanently deleted in 10 days.[10]
Philanthropy
In 2012, Ghahramani purchased at auction the controversial[11] oil on canvas painting Emperor Haute Couture by Canadian artist
Margaret Sutherland, in order to provide pro bono public viewings of it at educational institutions.[12][13][14]
In 2016, Ghahramani along with the
Open Society Foundations funded a 130-page report written by Canadian privacy experts at the
University of Toronto and
University of Ottawa calling for the government to acknowledge and constrain the use of portable surveillance devices that indiscriminately dredge data from people's smartphones.[18][19][20]