Data Broker Lets You See Their Dossier About You Starting Today
forbes.com
forbes.com
An advertising company wants me to enter my name and address and make sure the database they sell has the correct information on me.. hmm... I think I'll pass.
ZipCode + SSN is enough to identify you, even without your name, close to 100% of the time. Toss in your name and I'd be amazed they'd ever got a false positive. I'm [honestly] not sure why they even bother asking for a mailing address other than to go from 99.9% confidence to 100%.
Fyi, there is ~8k people [on average] in a zip code. The odds of your name and SSN repeating inside a zip code is low. Name tho? Name could happen with reasonable odds. I used to know someone in my zip code with an identical first/last [not middle] name.
If there are 10,000 possible 4 digit combinations and 8,000 people in a ZIP code on average, the odds that someone else will share the last 4 digits of my SSN is 1-(1-1/10000)^7999 which comes out to 55%. So in reality, more often than not, you will share the last 4 digits of your SSN with someone in your zip code.
Also, there are a few zip codes with 100,000+ people in them, and many zip codes with 50,000+ people in them. These zip codes account for many millions of people. You are guaranteed that nearly every resident will share the last 4 digits of their social security number with at least one other person in these zip codes.
I'm reasonably certain he's not sharing his data with Acxiom, but I'm also reasonably certain you were planning on visiting other websites once you get there.
Amazon is clearly not selling them information.
Overstock.com is now on my douchebag list.
My contacts say this is a real and legit attempt to get out in front of potential regulation. Because of the regulations around credit data, it is derived from a variety of non-credit sources. The only information they are likely to use from this site is the email address. In general, they do not trust user-provided information.
I think the reaction they are hoping for is "I guess that's not so bad" but what I think they are going to get is "wow, you don't know anything about me."
Oh, and they really do honor the opt-out stuff. So few people do it that it actually improves the response rate of advertisers because the people who care enough to opt out are never going to respond.
I wish they put a hit counter on it. I'd love to see how much traffic they get.
But I'm also surprised as many hacker newsers have submitted their info as it sounds. So, if hamfisted works, hamfist.
Now you just gave them a unique user ID to tie it all together.
(IANAL.)
In the privacy policy for the new site, Acxiom says it will allow users to edit and suppress information about themselves. However, to see their file, users must give up personal data and pass an authentication exam. That means giving your address, email, last four digits of your Social Security number and date of birth. Can they use that information? “The information you provide may be shared within the Acxiom Corporation family of businesses,” the company says.
[1] https://personalreports.lexisnexis.com/access_your_personal_...
Now I wonder if the reason for their sale was prescience about open source grid processing -- which would have been against the grain at the time (this was before Hadoop was universally adopted even at Yahoo).
What's also interesting is that the sale indicated they also believed that they were to have no competitive advantage in further development/deployment/maintenance of data infrastructure. This is unlike the Internet firms I've worked at where even if the entire stack was open source, continued in-house development and operation of the stack was vital to the business. At first that surprised me, but then again compared to, e.g., Internet advertising data their data is never anonymous, much cleaner, and smaller in absolute volume (number web pages each unique client visits in a week -- which is a number greater than each unique individual -- visits vs. number of items each individual purchases from a store in a week).
More options and tools here: http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote...
Let's say you run a DMP, you think you can be smart by tracking people with cookies that have a "DO NOT TRACK"==True field.
Very soon though, you will be deluged by more noise than signal, and it quite literally becomes useless. It's honestly easier for companies to not track people who have a opt-out cookie.
Source: Wrote a prototype DMP for my company once
http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/950/d2ys.png
Also, can you define DMP? I did do some googling first, and I'm not sure which acronym you're referring to.
EDIT: Found it. DMP stands for Data Management Platform. For anyone else: http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-tracking/d...
Interesting that my profile is so specific, yet utterly incorrect.
In fact this whole site reeks of a scam, similar to a "Free personality test" or "Love IQ" test online that is really just a way to gain valuable personal information, except instead of playing off social anxieties to trick people into taking a test they are playing off privacy anxieties to get people to divulge more information...
This is clearly not the same data I had when I used their web service at a startup I worked at in 2000. They had a service you could provide a phone number to and it would return a little story like this:
"Bob Smith from Portland, Oregon uses in-home pregnancy tests, drinks imported beer, and listens to alternative rock radio stations."
None of those sorts of rich details are in my data.
Say what you will about the creepyness of automatic profiling, but in my experience it has made some significant progress towards advancing advertising from a necessary evil to a genuine value-add.
Is that actually the kind of ads you see? I've been using AdBlock since forever, but I assumed all the ads were flashy commercials for everyone. Maybe my friends without AdBlock are just boring.
As a budding CS major I had a job with Acxiom. Most of it involved running phone books through sheet fed scanners, collating a truly massive amount of publicly available information. A lot of work was done on a custom OCR engine to parse all of this data.
Wow. I had to take a minute to let that sink in.
No way in hell I'm giving them my social, address, etc. XD
:(
/s (kinda)
Translation: "Fuck you, we'll show you obnoxious weight loss ads instead"
Your full name.
Your date of birth.
your zip code. Your street. The number.
your social security number.
Your marital status. Please specify the sex of your kids and also their ages o I could contrast with my database better and inform you if you are wrong.
Your job.
This is a classic storyteller or talker with your ancestors trick.
Allright, let's sign up...
> State: ZIP:
So... USA only? Okay, let's see http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html
> 316,606,919
Not quite 700M, calling BS.
They make no compunction, though, that's not what I want.