Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

A friend of mine worked for Acxiom, and when they looked themselves up they found 6-7 different profiles, all fantastically wrong, some clearly mixed with information from other people.

Admittedly it's a very private person that I'm talking about who deliberately obscures themselves by leaving incorrect or misspelled information when forced to give any information, and who moves, switches jobs often, has an odd name, and changed that odd name through marriage. But I think that a lot of us are falling for the marketing of these intelligence companies, rather than judging them by predictive effectiveness because we don't have any access to that.

There's no real theory of mind behind all of this stuff; it seems to be that it will only ultimately be effective for creating black/whitelists where you don't care about a lot of false positives.




> A friend of mine worked for Acxiom, and when they looked themselves up they found 6-7 different profiles, all fantastically wrong, some clearly mixed with information from other people.

With my tin foil hat on tight, maybe they create shitty profiles on all their employees so they don't get freaked out and run for the hills!


That’s a tight hat, I think I own the same one.


Terrifying that, even if they're looking up themselves, they're seeing other people's private data..




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: