Not just fear of Google and Facebook
Now, governments, watchdogs, consumer groups and alert citizens will continue to keep a close eye on these types of companies, but perhaps we should look for the danger in another direction. Small, ambitious startups or smart hackers who use the current tools in such a way that a whole bunch of data suddenly becomes public or can be made public that should not be public.
Sumit Suman from Mentii encountered such a website. He visited the uberVU website and viewed its list to data landing and pricing page. He did not sign up for anything, did not leave his email address anywhere on the site and did not actively connect to any of the social media tools on the site. And yet, a day later he received an email from uberVU. He therefore rightly wonders whether this is common, whether this is done openly and whether it is even legally allowed.
uberVU
uberVU used the services of a company called LeadLander. This company identifies users by their company name, by looking at, for example, the IP address, and then knows how to reach that visitor by email through profiles on business networking sites such as LinkedIn and Jigsaw (read: spamming).
However, LeadLander also does form tracking, which is what people fill out on website forms. The company provides “in-depth analysis of what each visitor is doing both before and after completing the form, how they got there, and when they return in the future.” In an email conversation with a potential client, LeadLander explains it this way: “For example, if a visitor went to ABC.com and filled out a web form there, and then later visits XYZ.com, XYZ.com can identify the visitor by name and email address and company information, even though the visitor never filled out a form on XYZ.com!”