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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

There seems no statement about privacy, which seems necessary for a server-side application that accepts DOB, country and gender informations.

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There is also a Facebook request that encodes your data (I used fake data here):

https://www.facebook.com/tr/?id=1249359911880793&ev=PageView...

this will be costly for them

Q: What does the website admin get out of adding this to their website?

Audiences in their Facebook Ads account they can filter / target.

it has an "Impressum" link that's broken. Parent(?) company is says this about themself:

> World Data Lab (WDL) is a data enterprise which produces the most consistent and credible estimates for spending and demography. Our data models are global, granular, and forward looking and track the Sustainable Development Goals in real time, helping provide unique insights for businesses. Our research has appeared on CNN, in the Economist, and the Financial Times. Our clients include HSBC, L'Oreal, and Citibank. Our advisory board includes leading representatives of the World Bank, Brookings Institution, and academia.

yikes!

I always enter slightly wrong data into sites like this.

Now I really regret putting my data into this system...

Do it again with fake data and emjoy the targeted ads for private helicopters and gold toilets.

I don't see any ads anyways so I should be good :D And Facebook probably still has my date of birth from my now long deleted account, so I guess no real damage was done, yeehaa.

Why would you ever tell the truth to a site like this, no matter the privacy policy?

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie had a song about this about 20 years ago.

"Whatever you do when they're talking to you, for god's sake lie"

You can get useful info just slightly wrong, and it's for entertainment purposes anyway, so lie.

And always run them in a private tab so they have less data to correlate.

None of those things are considered Personally Identifiable Information unless associated with a name or something similar, at least according to all the PII training I had when working for the government.

At best, it's a bad practice to collect personal information without a privacy policy. IANAL so I can't say much beyond that.

What do you think this data can be used for?

Personally identifiable information (PII) doesn't necessarily have a meaning in isolation but can identify the personal identity when combined somehow. So any website that operates on PII needs to have some sort of privacy policy no matter what it does to PII.

As said by another poster, this data can be used with other information to identify you and potentially breach your security.

There's a nice, and a little bit terrifying, podcast that goes in detail on techniques used to obtain and hack people that are worth hacking. (https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/112/) This episode specifically.

Interestingly, it doesn't use cookies or local storage.

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