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Comment by rsobers | Hacker News Reader

HubSpot (and pretty much any other marketing automation tool) has this feature, too. They lookup company name and location by IP address and build an anonymous "prospect" record representing each visitor so that salespeople and marketers can detect whether prospects from a given company are hitting the site for information.

The second a prospect submits a web form, all that previous web activity is tied to their email address (and any other info you collected via the form). You now have a real lead.

I don't see any privacy issues with this.

What I would see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query "Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?" and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.

The moment you start giving my PII to a company that I didn't voluntarily give it to is when I feel a line has been crossed.

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> What I would see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query "Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?" and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.

That appears to be exactly what's happening. The email mentions "access to our entire network of identified data ([...] we can identify any visitor [...] if that person has filled out a web form from any other website we are tracking)".

Well, then this is F'd up. I guess I didn't read the post carefully enough. :-/

According to the sales rep, their tracking capability goes far beyond ip lookup. It explicitly involves saving form data from site A and sharing that personal information with site B.

Most DMPs can do that you know. Some better DMPs like BlueKai do it anonymously, but there are companies out there that use and target PIIs. I believe RapLeaf was one such company (correct me if I am wrong)

This isn't what Hubspot does at all. While you are correct in that they, along with Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, etc all look up company/location via IP, none of these companies are getting information from another website to identify prospects.

In the case of marketing automation, all the data lives within the system and is used by the company - rather than giving that information out - a very different proposition.

Well, isn't the scenario you would take issue with exactly what is happening here? From the article: "For example, if [a visitor] went to XYZ.com and filled out a web form and then [the visitor] later visited 42floors.com, [42Floors] would be able to identify [the visitor] by name/email as well as company details even though [the visitor] never filled out a web form on [42Floors.com]."

Marketo has this too ... they are all over the place! I manage multiple "online" identities so I can track who is me directly (and who is implied me).

I misread the article, the company the OP mentions is doing something far more sinister than what Marketo does. I can understand not wanting to be tracked at all, though.

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