6 ms·
A company recently demoed to me that they have the ability to see the work history, credit report, and bank balance of a visitor that visits a site with some tr
by myprotegeai 2y ago
A company recently demoed to me that they have the ability to see the work history, credit report, and bank balance of a visitor that visits a site with some tracking code, in under 500ms. They use this information for a product that qualifies leads for sales teams, so the sales team knows who is a waste of time to go after and who isn't.
Creeps me the fuck out, and the owners seem to have no ethical qualms about buying, selling, and using this data.
- anjel 2y agoSoon to be combined with palantir face recognition tech. No need to chip your citizenry!
- bofadeez 2y agoSounds like vaporware. Might be possible for a negligibly small % of visitors. And even then cold outreach is not very effective.
- drdaeman 2y agoIt's basically same as classic approach of correlating salaries with ZIP codes, just with more parameters. Which sort of works statistically, because there are correlations - but is nothing more than a hallucination at individual visitor scale.
- bofadeez 2y agoThat seems more realistic. But even if a marketer theoretically had access to atomic level detail on every single prospect, there's not much they can do to manufacture demand. Humans are kind of smart and resistant to manipulation. Especially the ones with money.
- drdaeman 2y ago> Humans are kind of smart and resistant to manipulation. Especially the ones with money. I'm not sure. I think gaming/gambling industry having a concept of "whales" kind of disproves this.
- whycombinater 2y agoJust beat them to death. Jury nullification. Or vote, or whatever the site rules permit, good luck with that.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y agoWait.. physical site like a store or a web site? Not that either would make it that much better than the other, but you got me really curious.
- luckylion 2y ago"A visitor" as in "any visitor"? Or rather "a visitor", i.e. a specific one, about whom they already possess all this data and it's just a look up? The latter I absolutely believe. The former I'd file under sci-fi marketing tales that anyone with some amount of knowledge about web technologies wouldn't fall for.
- next_xibalba 2y agoNone of it is accurate and almost all of it is modeled from sparse, low quality training sets. Banks are not selling PII’ed account balance data to shady aggregators. To me, the more interesting and outrageous story is how many aggregators are able to sell garbage data so successfully.
- hammock 2y ago>Banks are not selling PII’ed account balance data to shady aggregators. But is Plaid? And banks do sell account balance data, they also sell credit and debit transaction history
- dml2135 2y agoSeems like Plaid would be f’d six ways til Sunday if it got out that they were selling consumer data to 3rd parties, no? A huge part of their business model is based on trust and doing that would completely burn it.
- hedvig23 2y agoThat logic suffices as truth to you?
- hammock 2y agohttps://finledger.com/articles/plaid-settled-58-million-lawsuit-over-alleged-consumer-data-sharing/ https://finledger.com/articles/plaid-settled-58-million-laws...
- dml2135 2y agoSorry, maybe “third party” isn’t the correct term. Let me try to lay out my point a bit more clearly: Plaid’s business model is — Company A needs a consumer’s data from Bank B. Plaid takes the consumer’s banking credentials, gets the data, and sells it to Company A. At no point in this process does Plaid go and sell this data to another unrelated Company C. The lawsuit cited was about Plaid not sufficiently explaining its position between Company A and Bank B to the consumer. It was not about Plaid going and selling the data to the highest bidder.
- vundercind 2y agoThe first time I saw a session replay of all the mouse movements and input of a user on their own fucking computer that some marketing website-spyware had recorded was the moment I decided the Internet was a mistake.
- rexarex 2y agoYou mean the free product Microsoft Clarity that everyone uses?
- vundercind 2y agoNah, it was some smallish company’s SAAS thingy. This was maybe 2015.
- a13n 2y agofullstory
- vundercind 2y agoIt was already common then, I gather—the ex-developer-product-owner guy who showed it to me (in the course of doing something else) didn’t seem to think it was remarkable, just an assumed capability. I don’t recall the name of the product, but it’d record all the input and page content for an entire session, you could watch it play back like a video. Exactly like standing over someone’s shoulder while they used their computer. Creepy as fuck, but some genius renamed “spyware” to “telemetry” and that was enough to get every developer on board because we’re super insecure and will jump at the chance to pretend we’re building Mars rovers or something else real while we make yet another “app” the world doesn’t need (I suppose that’s why that label was so successful at changing attitudes, anyway)
- jonhohle 2y agoIsn’t this how heatmaps were generated as far back as the late 2000s?
- ranger_danger 2y agoNothing like this exists for data on the general public and it would be illegal anyways. Either one of you is not aware of what that product actually isn't, or are being intentionally deceitful and spreading FUD.
- bitnasty 2y agoEver heard of the national public data breach?
- advisedwang 2y agohttps://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/national-public-data-breach-what-you-need-to-know-843686f7-06e2-4e91-8a3f-ae30b7213535 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/national-public-da... does not mention work history, credit reports, or bank balances.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoThe Experian breaches did. ADP sells recurring payroll as well. Shouldn’t be too hard to cross reference.
- rib3ye 2y agoName the company please.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoWhat data broker would even sell this data?
- m463 2y agoWhat if it was your daughter? 22 years old, height proportional to weight, poor decision making skills. What about your son? I've seen this offered to young kids paying rent: "Flex lets you pay rent on a schedule that works better for your monthly budget and frees up your cash flow." "Help you pay rent on time. Improve your cash flow. Build your credit history."
- ruined 2y agofree startup idea: trolley-solver-as-a-service. integrate something like this with license plate data, property records, person recognition, and realtime location. when a self-driving automobile detects that it's out of control and unable to avoid imminent liability, it can make a cost-benefit analysis of each prospective casualty by querying an API that provides an avoidance score for each consumer and property in the vicinity. based on this score the client automobile will be able to identify a route of least liability. consumers may be encouraged to integrate with these services by assigning unidentified things a score of zero.
- Grimblewald 2y agoDon't give them ideas. Given the thing's we've been seeing, you just know some nepo-CEO somewhere will read this and think it is A) their idea, and B) brilliant.
- ruined 2y agohire me a patent lawyer
- datavirtue 2y agoDamn, that was harsh.
- zoltrix303 2y agoI had a similar experience once where a vendor demoed their tracking tech for advertising. This was in France (before GDPR) and they had partnered with many apps (Weather apps and such) to access user locations. I don't remember the size of their target but it was a big chunk of the French population. They showed a map of Paris showing the day of a particular user from leaving their home, which route they took, how long they stood in front of which store and how long the spend inside others etc. My boss at the time found the whole thing very exciting...
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoWhile out hiking one day, I started thinking about buying a small ladder for the kitchen. When I got home that evening, I started seeing ads for ladders even though I had not searched for ladders, spoke to anyone about ladders, or even texted anyone about them. It was just a thought I had while hiking. Was it a coincidence or something else? Finally figured it out a day later when reviewing my hike on the Fitbit app. At the end of my hike I forgot to shutoff route tracking. On my way home, I had stopped by Walmart to grab a few things and while there, looked at their ladders. I could see on the app the path I took through the store, including when I stopped for a few minutes in front of the ladders. That was enough data to trigger ads for ladders for the next couple of days. We leak data about ourselves constantly without realizing how much we're doing it or where it ends up going. Lots of it is also circumstantial and makes me wonder what erroneous ideas some of these databases might have accumulated over the years and who gets to see that "information". What happens if you walk through a part of town where there's an activist rally for "We Love Kitten Torture" going on? Do you forever get tagged in a bunch of databases as an animal torturer?
- squigz 2y agoWe don't leak data about ourselves. Companies specifically collect data about us, and then do whatever they want with it.
- riahi 2y agoThis sounds like they are somehow identifying the user and querying theworknumber. You can get a ton from a worknumber query.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoThey do get info on those that willingly share, but not the other ones. Problem is that people share so much that those that do not start to stand out and might get penalized as well.
- belter 2y ago"Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker" - https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-data-broker-leak/ https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...
- Justsignedup 2y agoOverheard a convo from our sales team "I reached out to a few people, just waiting for them to do more than 5 seconds of Google searching of us before we reach back out"
- juanani 2y ago[dead]