4 ms·

Ask HN: How did they get my email?

15 points by cx42net 11y ago

Hi, I was searching for an image on google and went to Price Minister (http://www.priceminister.com/) on the specific product page of what I was looking for. I shared the image to a friend and closed all the tab related to my search. Half an hour after, I received an email from Price Minister suggesting me to buy or sell that specific product I viewed. Now I know this is kind of "normal" for a e-commerce shop, but what is really interesting/troubling is that, even though I have an account with the correct email : * I did not logged in that website since at least 2 years * I formatted my computer a few times since the last time I connected to Price Minister * The IP provided by my ISP is changing in a week basis * I took a look on their website, I'm not logged in (of course!) That's the reason I'm turning to you. Do you know how they did to know it was me ?! Thank you for your insights. I believe they will be interesting !

dangrossman 11y ago
Among other things, they're using Criteo Email, which can supposedly identify an e-mail address for up to 30% of a site's unregistered traffic. http://www.criteo.com/what-we-do/products/ http://www.criteo.com/what-we-do/products/ You'll find that, along with a dozen other marketing/tracking related products, by observing all the JavaScript tags the site loads through your browser's network inspector. You won't find some of them in the HTML source because they're using tag managers to inject additional script tags into the page after it's loaded.
- cx42net 11y ago
  Thank you for your message. That's impressive, and really disturbing! Is there more details somewhere about how they can get an email, and how to avoid this ?
- ericmo 11y ago
  That's very creep. Would adblocker stop that kind of script injection?
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    If you want to block tracking scripts, Ghostery is the go-to extension for that.
  - cx42net 11y ago
    There is a nice article in LifeHacker that may come in handy for the problem here : http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-protect-your-privacy-479408034 http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote... I personnaly went with Disconnect (https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacafpbcihiomhlakheieifhpjdfeo/related https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacaf... ) but the LifeHacker post is a must read imho.
  - hoers 11y ago
    A lot of them, yes. But there are techniques like browser profiling or persistent cookies[1] that still manage to trump a lot of them. The best blocker I've come across is ublock, amazingly memory efficient, fully customizable and featuring so many good block lists that it should block at least as much as ghostery or disconnect (if not more). Just the GUI looks a bit .. functional [1] http://samy.pl/evercookie/ http://samy.pl/evercookie/
- ljk 11y ago
  on top of abp, does add-ons like NoScript or Ghostery help?