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Comment by Vagantem | Hacker News Reader

Had a similar experience - worked in a big ad agency who hired a new web-developer for one of our clients. As they are one of the biggest website providers, they could identify most of the people that visited a client's site - it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.

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> it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.

Please share more information.

Did that require the user to be logged into FB?

Here is a hint

https://docs.fullcontact.com/#enrich-api

As an engineer, I'm amazed. As a person who doesn't want the person on the other end of every website I visit to know who exactly I am, I feel violated. At this point though, all I feel I can do as a hapless consumer is to desensitize myself to said violation.

I use a VPN, Pi-Hole, Ghostery and Firefox. All of these a relatively recent additions though, so if a website can get my email and that links to an already existing database of all my collected data up to that point, I'm buggered anyway.

Just making sure you're aware of the discussion around Ghostery that's happened here on HackerNews, so you can make an informed decision:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15969525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16809625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617827

F-ing wonderful. Almost reaffirming the inevitability of it all really. Back to uBlock it is. Thanks for the heads up.

Not ublock, you need to use ublock origin.

How about AdNausium for the extra middle finger.

From this reprehensible API, "enriching" a simple candidate key (e.g. email addr) (slightly edited for brevity):

https://docs.fullcontact.com/#data-add-ons

    { "gender": "Male",
      "name": {
        "given": "Johnathan",
        "family": "Doe",
        "middle": "David",
        "prefix": "Mr",
        "suffix": "Jr",
        "nickname": "John"
      },
      "age": {
        "birthday": {
          "year": 1980,
          "month": 1,
          "day": 10
        },
        "range": "35-44",
        "value": 37
      },
      "locations": [
        { "label": "deduced",
          "formatted": "Denver, Colorado, United States"
        }
      ],
      "education": [
        { "name": "State University",
          "degree": "Masters Degree of Automation",
          "end": { "year": 1998 }
        }
      ],
      "employment": [
        { "name": "ACME, Inc",
          "domain": "http://www.example.com",
          "current": false,
          "title": "Widget Maker",
          "start": { "year": 2010, "month": 6, "day": 1 },
          "end": { "year": 2015, "month": 10, "day": 15 }
        }
      ],
      "interests": [
        { "name": "Quilting",
          "affinity": "HIGH",
          "category": "hobbies"
        }
      ]
    }

edit: Note the arrays, which presumably can return multiple records.

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