Hacker News Reader

Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

fyi most of the major marketing automation platforms already let you do this. They're based upon a peer-to-peer exchange of lead information (i.e you identify yourself to one site and they'll sell that information to other sites in exchange for identifying information about other users), hence it's already far more accurate than public registrar information.

View on HN

Hey Imran (chatted to you in IRC a few times),

I do realise that lead information is sold, and I've had enough offers to sell my own users (which I've declined) to realise just how prevalent the practise is.

LinkedIn sell a fairly complete business dataset. My point is that a lot of people might imagine they could do this, but probably don't really believe that they are doing this.

Then when you add in Intro's almost constant tracking (vs occasionally accessing one of the sites that sells your data - or LinkedIn on the web) it is easy to see just how complete one would be making that dataset.

I'd say that most people don't really understand believe that this happens and how good (if that's the word) that dataset already is.

Which LinkedIn dataset are you talking about ? - Rapleaf used to sell one but I don't think that's available anymore.

Citation needed. There's no reference anywhere on LinkedIn's site to selling data sets at all. The only thing they sell are subscriptions to their site and there's nothing anywhere that indicates any of those include any kind of this data.

If I read this right, Visistat itself says that they aggregate visit data provided by a list of websites that include LinkedIn:

http://www.visistat.com/visistat-solutions-social-media.php

Looking at their live demo it looks like you just sign-in with the linkedin auth and they use the regular LinkedIn API to enrich people information, so it's not anything the average user can't access via Linkedin anyway.

If this is true, this whole thread is full of misinformation.

What platforms do this?

I'm pretty curious how they advertise the fact that they do something like this as well.

marketo for example.

I think I'm confused as to what, exactly, they do that you're objecting to.

Some time ago on HN I remember reading about a company that embeds forms on websites. So if I filled out a contact form on Site A, the third party collects the information, stores a cookie on my computer. Then when I visit Site B, the cookie uniquely identifies me, and the third party company gives my email address to Site B, even though I didn't fill out a form.

Is this what you're suggesting marketo does?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com