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Comment by ck_one | Hacker News Reader

Is that actually possible? Can we do a live test here?

Let's say we want this dataset: Credit card line items for 35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street in local town

How much do I have to pay you to get it?

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i think it could be feasible to get an ad in front of "35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street in local town" who has bought product X but i've never seen a transaction by transaction purchase history being for sale.

How much you got?

Never ask a sales person how much yo have to pay when the prices are not already clearly stated. Tell them how much you are willing to spend to see if they will do it for that amount. Sales people will always shoot high hoping to not leave money on the table. The price might change depending on how much you squeal and how high they shot. Your initial "willing to spend" should also be lower than you're actually willing to spend for the same but converse reason

But what type of range are we talking? Tens, hundreds, thousands?

It could also mean that if you have to ask... or the first rule of data brokering...

Seems like the first thing to do would be to get an account with one of these data brokers. I'd imagine most of these places are "contact us for pricing" so they can play used car salesman games

Or, you could ask John Oliver to do it for you and then tell all of us on one of his episodes exactly how in depth it could get. They have the money to do this, and it seems like something right in his team's wheel house

If you need John Oliver to do it maybe it's not such a big problem? If no one here is able to provide a single concrete example, maybe it's not real?

John Oliver likes to spend HBO's money to do things others can't do while entertaining the rest of us. I'm not spending my money on something to prove what is known as possible for you. At this point, even with receipts, you're coming across as someone that would argue that grass is not green, or water isn't wet, and fire isn't hot.

Just because someone doesn't answer your belligerent questions does not mean it's not possible. It probably means that the people that are doing this with first hand knowledge have too much to do than trying to convert doubting Thomas over here.

All of this started because in response to an extremely concrete question, what's the cost of transaction data for a tightly constrained population, you replied with a smug non-answer about the greed of salespeople. These questions only got "belligerent" because every single answer has been nonsense insisting that it's super easy and cheap but also I couldn't possibly name a single site where this data is sold or provide even an order of magnitude of cost. Or maybe now it requires HBO levels of funding, who knows.

I offered sage advice on how to negotiate when you don’t know a firm price on anything whether that be data or a car or a home remodeling. If you want to say that advice was a smug answer then that’s on you. Every answer after has just gone further and further off the rails

Nah there's no way you actually watch John Oliver because that was really funny. Anyways, you mentioned earlier that we wouldn't believe you even if you posted receipts but that's actually exactly what we want to see. Like, just the name of a business, the thing that was sold, and the price.

Ok, so nobody here knows directly of any case where such data has been purchased, or vaguely similar, and we have no pricing information whatsoever available, but we are somehow completely knowledgeable about it being possible and how to do it? That sounds unlikely.

Yeah people fail to provide examples but continue to be doomers about how easy it is.

Been busy, but since you seem to be unable to find any body by searching on your own for the past 6 hours, here's something I found with a quick little search.

https://datarade.ai/data-categories/food-grocery-transaction...

Have we really lost the ability to use search functionality??

The supposedly in-the-know responses here are full of bravado but not much other than "trust me, bro"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44565878

Yea, you know everything, don't you.

Wow the Transunion business site, that really proves it huh.

Experian is known to sell the data they have. Why is this even in question? If I provide you Experian's website, you would give the same BS response?

Let me google this for you...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+buy+data+from+a+data+broker...

The conversation was for buying transaction data from specific people, something that many seem to insist is easy and cheap and doable. Meanwhile if you actually read the responses to that search you smugly cited you'll find that no one seems to know how to actually do anything remotely like this. Yes this data is definitely harvested and it seems like you should be able to buy it in bulk from someone somewhere, but again no one seems to know where or how much or what the purchase minimum would be etc.

You asked for an example, one was given. if you’re saying you dont know how to send an email to a business page with the products purporting services described here - no comment in this section can help you

Of course people do. 5 seconds spent doing the most sparse-ass research will help you find plenty of stuff. If people don't respond, I imagine, for fear of 1) outing the specific area they work in, or 2) realizing these kinds of comments aren't generally acting in good faith so it is generally a complete waste of time.

I'll waste my own time and give a trivial example just off the top of my head. Go peruse some of the products offered on this page, put on your thinking cap or even look into them further and imagine what kind of data those services provide, where it likely comes from, and where it is sold to, and you'll be well on your way - and those are just the ones that are advertised openly.

https://www.transunion.com/business

Pretty much every one of the big players people typically associate with other areas such as personal credit have some feet in this space somewhere. Then theres the hundreds of lesser-known fly-by-night guys that have their own DB's they build off of mostly what is the same data, but correlated in different ways and sold to different audiences.

There are many, many services offering data-for-sale on practically anything to practically anyone. I heard of one recently claiming it can reliably determine someone's porn preferences. The fact you personally have never come across it, or are saying you aren't, is only a data point that is interesting to you, and no one else that actually knows what they are talking about in this space. Hope this post helps you somehow.

>There are many, many services offering data-for-sale on practically anything to practically anyone. I heard of one recently claiming it can reliably determine someone's porn preferences.

Okay but then why not name at least a couple such services. Also, if the tech industry isn't selling data to them, where do they obtain it? Again, I see lots of ambiguity here, and the example link from transunion is hardly revealing of anything.

Credit card companies are known to sell data. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mastercard-credit-card-customer...

Mobile service providers are known to have sold data. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-fines-largest-wireless-carr...

Auto makers are known to sell data. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a61711288/automakers-sold-...

You act like it doesn't happen, yet time and time again we learn about companies selling whatever data they can collect.

I can't believe we are still questioning this fact

What else do you need to know?

I think you misunderstand. I'm not doubting that it happens widely and pervasively. It's evident that this is the case. I just requested examples based on some of the very specific claims made here despite many ambiguities in how they were phrased.

Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to include some links.

For the most part, readers here are against it. Just because someone doesn’t know how to do it does not mean it is not doable. If it were not doable, these companies would not exist. I’ve already spent more time than I care on the topic. So if you want to think that people are collecting the data and not selling it to interested parties, the, boy, I don’t know. You can only lead hostess to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Hostess? You mean horses no?

>So if you want to think that people are collecting the data and not selling it to interested parties, the, boy, I don’t know.

As I very clearly said above, I don't doubt it at all, I was just asking for any clarification on who to whom.

and you were given them. so why keep taking this persistent obstinate line of questioning and persistent downvoting? it’s transparent and tired. industry experts chime in on this stuff all the time, it isnt anything done in backrooms or anything and is in the open. the only barrier to you not knowing is your own ignorance.

Persistent questioning (usually a good thing for debate by the way. I wasn't asking anything unreasonable), because I was curious and hoping for some answers from anyone willing to provide concrete details for claims that struck me as ambiguous on hard details, even though I don't doubt the widespread existence of personal data selling at all, as I've repeatedly mentioned.. As for downvoting, not sure what you mean. I can only say I've never once downvoted a single comment in any time spent commenting on this site, ever. I think the whole downvote thing is detestable and infantile. I'll even upvote things I disagree with just to counter it if I see them go grey.

Literally all anyone is asking for is one single concrete example of a site where you can roll up and buy personal information.

I didn’t ask for a link to a company that can do it. I want pricing. I am saying that nobody here is willing to share anything even approaching specific pricing, which makes me very much doubt that any of them have the direct transaction experience they are claiming. I don’t doubt that underwater welding exists, but I do doubt that anyone in this thread has done it, or has any direct experience with it.

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