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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

They even know unlisted data, like which buyers are currently looking. If they combine it with data from social network partners and other providers they can know the school-friend networks of the buyer's kids, church affiliations, how racist they are, etc.

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Social networks don't sell data like that

Do they have to sell the data for Zillow to figure it out? I assume at a certain point you get enough data from enough sources to make those inferences yourself.

Wouldn't a place like Zillow have first hand knowledge? You can sign in with your facebook account, for example. Linking your account will give them your public profile, friend list and email address.

You can sign up to Zillow via Facebook, where they get permission to pull the most relevant data points. They can then make additional inferences based on that.

Facebook offers targeting. They don't sell "data points".

"Sign up via Facebook" != "Facebook Ads"

What do you think are the most relevant data points that you believe can be pulled from that API?

Among other things they get access to "age range, gender, language", which in combination can often already be a good starting point. They also get access to the email address which can be used to pull more info via other APIs, if you have used that email much in the past. They also get access to "other public info", which I'm not 100% sure about, but I think that should be equivalent to what you see when you go on someones public profile page, and includes Page likes for a lot of people.

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