HubSpot Acquires Clearbit
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I have a feeling this will be very successful - but could they do this for B2B?
Why would we do that? Surely there is an AI model that can do it for us.
> personal messages
This also smells very illegal in the EU without consent.
How do they map IPs to companies? Do their chrome extensions send data back or something? It seems fairly difficult to me especially with CG-NAT growing and growing?
It's often entered by hand, by a salesperson with a telephone handset in the other hand. Typos, inaccuracy abound, which limits the ability to analyse and gain insight from the data, as well as to use it effectively in automated processes.
Hubspot have been releasing features and changes that start to address this, and I expect powering it all with Clearbit data will be the first thing they do with this acquisition.
There are quite a few companies competing in this space, so there are options if Clearbit shut the doors to use outside of Hubspot.
My company is one of those, focusing on IP->Business matching, but also selling direct access to our database of business information in certain circumstances. (www.leadforensics.com).
Citation? Or just an assumption?
I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell users email address to a data broker under GDPR.
Consequently, they're not protecting data because they care about privacy -- they're protecting data because the wider they share the raw data, the less value it (their product) is.
It's economic self-interest, not ethics.
If they didn't have ad networks, they'd sell anything and everything in a heartbeat.
I used to be all gung-ho about being anti-FAANG, those evil privacy violators, but having now talked to friends who have worked at places like FB and Google, their internal data security practices are far more stringent than I had imagined (my friends complain about how difficult these rules make their jobs!). And yeah, sure, they are scooping up as much information about you as they can, and I'm not a big fan of that fact. But I have been convinced that they are actually somewhat decent stewards of that information, and the alternative is far worse.
All that being said, this is a pretty loosely-held belief, and all the surveillance and so on is quite icky to me. I'm still trying to slowly de-google my life and all that, just with a bit less paranoia and urgency.
I look at it a slightly different way.
Absent the vertical integration, they wouldn't dominate the market.
Absent dominating the market, they wouldn't wield as many resources.
Absent as many resources, they wouldn't have been able to build a panopticon in the first place.
And even if there were excesses in an alternate world... there would be a market of competitors, which would encourage different behavior.
And possibly even (gasp!) regulation because of the worst excesses.
Instead, FAANG wield vast resources, culled from entrenched monopoly positions, and act just responsible enough (plus lobbying) to avoid regulation.
Direct marketing is not explicitly banned. If you have a reason to believe that the data subject in question (a B2B person operating in the context of their work) is interested in buying your stuff then you could claim "legitimate interest" and process their contact details/market to them.
That's what people are relying on at the moment. Whether all the data protection authorities in all the member states will agree with the market's assessment of this remains to be seen...
Wouldn't this require knowledge of the email beforehand?
When passing identifiers, there's generally some combination of lookup tables, per-distribution salted hashes, or encryption happening to make reverse mapping as difficult as possible.
(I was in this space up until a few years ago).
I mean, can eye-tracking in a WebXR session be used to identify users? Yes, clearly that is a possibility. But will the addition of eye-tracking increase the identifiability of users? No, not in the least, because users are already identifiable by means that involve core browser features.
But frequently, the "privacy advocates" win and we're left with a web platform that has a lot of weird, missing functionally in comparison to native apps, pushing developers to either compromise on functionality or develop a native app. Compromising is bad for users. And developing a native app could can be bad for the developer, if one considers their existing investment in web technologies. Or both the developer and users, when one considers the vig that app stores charge, or the editorial control that app stores enforce over socially-controversial-yet-not-actually-illegal topics. Or just users when one considers the fact that the app stores just hand app developers a user identity without even making them work for it with fingerprinting.
And often, the voices that are loudest in defence of "privacy" are browser developers that also just so happen to be employed by said app store vendors.
Some companies are trying to sell you on "AI based" solutions that take deanonymization a step further, but as far as I can tell, it's mostly horseshit and wishful thinking.
I get solicited by dozens of companies daily. And I've seen nobody who can provide this de-annonymization of website visitors.
What I mean is that they provide enough information to pair your first-party data with "anonymous" web traffic matched to the account level with enough granularity to line up the two.
That said, most of the companies in this space massively over promise and under deliver. The one thing they all have in common is that they're good at ABM, so they can sell to your CMO/CRO faster than you can call them out on their bullshit.
Clearbit (nor my company) don't do anything B2C.
I wonder if it was a good purchase for HubSpot though, but who am I to judge those M&A's :-)
hum? The original CEO is developing https://reflect.app/