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A comment on Companies that buy data derived from scraping the contents of email. Parent comment

Re:Companies that buy data derived from scraping the content... by gnicholas on Monday February 10, 2020 @04:04PM (#22293314)
Sounds pretty silly to extract your data instead of showing you ads — all in the name of protecting your privacy.

But to play devil's advocate, some ads do actually invade your privacy because they come from malicious malvertisers. If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this.

Or they could just run an ad platform that blocks malvertisements...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Companies that buy data derived from scraping the content... by JohnFen on Monday February 10, 2020 @04:56PM (#22293822)
> If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this.

There is no privacy benefit here because you'd have even better privacy protections if they didn't trawl through your emails and extract data from them in the first place.

[ Parent | on HN ]