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The HN title of this article, cf. the true title on the vice.com web page, fails to consider that this article is also about the companies that sell data derive
by 3xblah 7y ago
The HN title of this article, cf. the true title on the vice.com web page, fails to consider that this article is also about the companies that sell data derived from scraping the contents of email. Arguably the sellers are more interesting here as they are the ones doing the scraping and creating the market.
- altdatathrow 7y agoSomeone changed the title. The original submission title matched the article title [1]. Feels like an intentional re-characterization to place the blame on the ones purchasing the data, as opposed to the ones harvesting and selling. This journalist is the same who exposed Jumpshot [2] for similar tactics (selling highly-sensitive user-level data), and a few days later the entire company (~230 employees) shut down. I asked about a similar problem [3] on a "Who's Hiring" last week to a YC-funded company and dang was quick to detach that comment, as it was off-topic for the context of the thread. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+inurl%3A22291484 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+... [2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus-sells-user-browsing-data-investigation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus-se... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229267