Re:Complexities of e-mail validation logic
by nerdponx on Monday May 24, 2021 @12:20PM
(#27266231)
I've wondered about this with big companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. as well as behind-the-scenes spyware/ad firms who are all probably very interested in linking my identity across user accounts, email addresses, device fingerprints, etc. I've hoped that there aren't enough people doing it (yet) for these orgs to find it worth the effort.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
There very much are companies doing this and selling it as a service...here's an API that you can query with a piece of contact information to retrieve all sorts of additional information, including hashes of alternate email addresses, mobile device ids, social media profiles, and plenty of other stuff: https://platform.fullcontact.com/docs/apis/enrich/person-ins...
Re:Complexities of e-mail validation logic
by rootusrootus on Monday May 24, 2021 @01:39PM
(#27267339)
At a certain point -- probably the moment it becomes a business unto itself -- this kind of data collection should be subject to all the same rules we've come up with for credit bureaus. It should be a legal requirement that I can get the entire profile they have built for me.
I was wondering specifically if they have special cases to identify such "personal" email domains and use them for record linkage.
It seems like an obvious thing to try, but maybe not worth the effort of implementing it, given the high risk of false positives and the low % of people who actually do stuff like this (not to mention they're probably not people who click on ads anyway).
Re:Complexities of e-mail validation logic
by rootusrootus on Monday May 24, 2021 @01:37PM
(#27267304)
Given the sheer amount of money involved, I believe it is likely that there are players in the market who are far more capable than we give them credit for.