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Comment by NiekvdMaas | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the http://ubervu.com/ website, it seems they are using a tracking service hosted on http://trackalyzer.com/. This is a privately registered domain (there is no index page either), but from http://trackalyzer.com/w3c/policy1.xml we can derive that this service is operated by LeadLander.com.

The LeadLander product seems to identify users by company name (most likely by checking the IP address/netblock) and then "integrates" with LinkedIn and Jigsaw in order to contact (spam?) the users by email (see: http://www.leadlander.com/web_analytics.asp).

Definitely interesting, but legal? Not very likely...

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> Definitely interesting, but legal? Not very likely...

There is nothing in the US that makes this sort of activity illegal. The exceptions would include minors, health or certain financial information. Excluding that, unless it goes against something stated in their policies it is perfectly legal in the US.

The mapping part (IP/netblock --> email) might not be illegal in the USA, but I'm pretty sure that sending users unsolicited emails after visiting a website is.

That's a good point. An unsolicited advertisement for something could be considered illegal according to CAN-SPAM but if the individual has a relationship with that company than an email like the one the sent to Sumit is legal. It could likely be argued that visiting a site could be considered establishing a relationship.

That's just a guess on my part. I'd love to hear from someone better versed on the law about the legality of that email.

Sending unsolicited emails is not against the law. CAN-SPAM law states that users must be able to opt out of receiving emails after they receive the email. There is nothing against the law of random companies sending emails to any individual they like, regardless of a previous business relationship.

Opt In is a cultural idea, not a legal one.

    f :: IPAddress -> [Maybe EmailAddress]

I am guessing that in order to get this function to work, the ad company would have a contract with a company such as LinkedIn or Twitter, who can perform this mapping, based on their server logs.

Which would be quite vile.

And probably illegal.

IP address alone isn't sufficent, browser info is also needed

That data is guaranteed to be public, per the rules governing the domain name registration system.

Have the various spam-blockers of the world gotten more complacent? This seems like the sort of indiscriminate crawling that would get you both a lot of valid e-mail addresses and a permanent home in everyone's junk folder.

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