On: I left the ad industry because of data tracking

[Vagantem]

Had a similar experience - worked in a big ad agency who hired a new web-developer for one of our clients. As they are one of the biggest website providers, they could identify most of the people that visited a client's site - it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.

[user17843 → Vagantem]

> it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.

Please share more information.

Did that require the user to be logged into FB?

[zed88 → user17843]

Here is a hint

https://docs.fullcontact.com/#enrich-api

[Aromasin → zed88]

As an engineer, I'm amazed. As a person who doesn't want the person on the other end of every website I visit to know who exactly I am, I feel violated. At this point though, all I feel I can do as a hapless consumer is to desensitize myself to said violation.

I use a VPN, Pi-Hole, Ghostery and Firefox. All of these a relatively recent additions though, so if a website can get my email and that links to an already existing database of all my collected data up to that point, I'm buggered anyway.

[pure-awesome → Aromasin]

Just making sure you're aware of the discussion around Ghostery that's happened here on HackerNews, so you can make an informed decision:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15969525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16809625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617827

[Aromasin → pure-awesome]

F-ing wonderful. Almost reaffirming the inevitability of it all really. Back to uBlock it is. Thanks for the heads up.

[lotsofpulp → Aromasin]

Not ublock, you need to use ublock origin.

[kazagistar → lotsofpulp]

How about AdNausium for the extra middle finger.

[pdkl95 → zed88]

From this reprehensible API, "enriching" a simple candidate key (e.g. email addr) (slightly edited for brevity):

https://docs.fullcontact.com/#data-add-ons

    { "gender": "Male",
      "name": {
        "given": "Johnathan",
        "family": "Doe",
        "middle": "David",
        "prefix": "Mr",
        "suffix": "Jr",
        "nickname": "John"
      },
      "age": {
        "birthday": {
          "year": 1980,
          "month": 1,
          "day": 10
        },
        "range": "35-44",
        "value": 37
      },
      "locations": [
        { "label": "deduced",
          "formatted": "Denver, Colorado, United States"
        }
      ],
      "education": [
        { "name": "State University",
          "degree": "Masters Degree of Automation",
          "end": { "year": 1998 }
        }
      ],
      "employment": [
        { "name": "ACME, Inc",
          "domain": "http://www.example.com",
          "current": false,
          "title": "Widget Maker",
          "start": { "year": 2010, "month": 6, "day": 1 },
          "end": { "year": 2015, "month": 10, "day": 15 }
        }
      ],
      "interests": [
        { "name": "Quilting",
          "affinity": "HIGH",
          "category": "hobbies"
        }
      ]
    }

edit: Note the arrays, which presumably can return multiple records.