"Acxiom offers marketing and information management services, including multichannel marketing, addressable advertising and database management. Acxiom collects, analyzes, and parses customer and business information for clients, helping them to target advertising campaigns, score leads, and more." [0]
An advertising company wants me to enter my name and address and make sure the database they sell has the correct information on me.. hmm... I think I'll pass.
Last 4 digits of SSN is particularly flagrant. I could almost believe (if I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, which I don't, particularly) that they are using name and email as good-faith identifiers to let me opt out. After all, they need to identify me with _something_. But what could they possibly be doing with SSN unless they have offline credit score information obtained from some third party, which they couldn't previously link confidently to my advertising profile, and now they can?
Is a 4 digit SSN number suffix really enough to be helpful to them in that regard? I guess they could find all "jcater"s with those 4 digits and make assumptions, but that is far from unique.
ZipCode + SSN is enough to identify you, even without your name, close to 100% of the time. Toss in your name and I'd be amazed they'd ever got a false positive. I'm [honestly] not sure why they even bother asking for a mailing address other than to go from 99.9% confidence to 100%.
Fyi, there is ~8k people [on average] in a zip code. The odds of your name and SSN repeating inside a zip code is low. Name tho? Name could happen with reasonable odds. I used to know someone in my zip code with an identical first/last [not middle] name.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misread the post you are replying to, which referred to the last 4 digits of a SSN, and incorrectly assumed we were talking about full SSNs. Because otherwise your statement is absurdly wrong.
If there are 10,000 possible 4 digit combinations and 8,000 people in a ZIP code on average, the odds that someone else will share the last 4 digits of my SSN is 1-(1-1/10000)^7999 which comes out to 55%. So in reality, more often than not, you will share the last 4 digits of your SSN with someone in your zip code.
Also, there are a few zip codes with 100,000+ people in them, and many zip codes with 50,000+ people in them. These zip codes account for many millions of people. You are guaranteed that nearly every resident will share the last 4 digits of their social security number with at least one other person in these zip codes.
You know, the second you login to this account from your new unspecified state, pg will know what state it is.
I'm reasonably certain he's not sharing his data with Acxiom, but I'm also reasonably certain you were planning on visiting other websites once you get there.
From my account it is pretty clear who is sharing data with them. They have 5 purchase records, and think I am into furniture and linens. Overstock.com and Jennifer Convertibles are guilty of selling out their customers.
I noticed it keys off of address and name for purchases. Created two accounts, one is home address which i never ship to and the other is my girlfriends house which had most my purchases except high value items which i ship to work. First account was completely empty on data. Second account had information filled out, seems to use purchases to determine interests. The vendor in question was one of the largest party supply e-commerce stores.
My contacts say this is a real and legit attempt to get out in front of potential regulation. Because of the regulations around credit data, it is derived from a variety of non-credit sources. The only information they are likely to use from this site is the email address. In general, they do not trust user-provided information.
I think the reaction they are hoping for is "I guess that's not so bad" but what I think they are going to get is "wow, you don't know anything about me."
Oh, and they really do honor the opt-out stuff. So few people do it that it actually improves the response rate of advertisers because the people who care enough to opt out are never going to respond.
I wish they put a hit counter on it. I'd love to see how much traffic they get.
So in order to see the information they may or may not have on you they ask for your name, full address, last 4 ssn, date of birth, and email... if they didn't have any data on you before they do now.
Yeap. And the US laws are such that once your details are known to a company in the US jurisdiction, you have basically no rights or recourse for what they can do with your details (ie sell them). I only know this as a friend is in law school researching & writing papers in this area.
I can't believe they bought off Forbes to market this scam. This is not about data disclosure, this is about collecting even more data in the name of "educating" you. You will be giving away most important pieces of your information to them in trying to know whatever half ass information they might supposedly have. If they really wanted to disclose fairly then they can just ask for email and do verification by sending link in email. They shouldn't need birth date and precious last digits of your SSN.
Before anyone types away their information, you should read this paragraph. This is a huge scam, a clever one:
In the privacy policy for the new site, Acxiom says it will allow users to edit and suppress information about themselves. However, to see their file, users must give up personal data and pass an authentication exam. That means giving your address, email, last four digits of your Social Security number and date of birth. Can they use that information? “The information you provide may be shared within the Acxiom Corporation family of businesses,” the company says.
I highly recommend requesting a LexisNexis Risk Solutions Full File Disclosure [1] at least once a year. You have to mail in copies of an ID and proof of address, but I found signs of identity theft that didn't appear on other credit reports.
I've worked with somebody who came from Acxiom's grid computing division -- who has left after they were sold of to EMC. Essentially they had a fairly advanced grid computing infrastructure (comparable to Map/Reduce or other Scatter/Gather) for what seems like a while before Google has. Compared to what was then (2007) Hadoop's State of the Art (mind you, we were working together at Yahoo) it seemed quite impressive.
Now I wonder if the reason for their sale was prescience about open source grid processing -- which would have been against the grain at the time (this was before Hadoop was universally adopted even at Yahoo).
What's also interesting is that the sale indicated they also believed that they were to have no competitive advantage in further development/deployment/maintenance of data infrastructure. This is unlike the Internet firms I've worked at where even if the entire stack was open source, continued in-house development and operation of the stack was vital to the business. At first that surprised me, but then again compared to, e.g., Internet advertising data their data is never anonymous, much cleaner, and smaller in absolute volume (number web pages each unique client visits in a week -- which is a number greater than each unique individual -- visits vs. number of items each individual purchases from a store in a week).
I could be wrong but ISTR seeing something on TV about Acxiom a few years ago -- something like 60 Minutes or Dateline or one of those "exposing stuff" shows -- where they were describing the massive infrastructure that they had.
Instead of signing up and cleaning their data for them, or "opting out" by installing their special cookie which continues to track you around the internet, opt out the right way: block all ad networks via a browser extension like Disconnect or Ghostery.
Not really. What most opt-out cookies do is that they have a "DO NOT TRACK" or "IGNORE" in the cookie fields.
Let's say you run a DMP, you think you can be smart by tracking people with cookies that have a "DO NOT TRACK"==True field.
Very soon though, you will be deluged by more noise than signal, and it quite literally becomes useless. It's honestly easier for companies to not track people who have a opt-out cookie.
I was curious as to what Acxiom's cookies actually look like after opting out. With a fresh Chrome Igcognito session, following through the opt out process, I get 20 cookies. Plenty of unique GUIDs perfectly capable of tracking me through the internet, and no occurances of "DO NOT TRACK" or "IGNORE". Screenshot here:
I would not give this company the last 4 of my SS to see what they know about me. My SS and the confirmation information they are seeking is worth far more to them than any info they will give me.
In fact this whole site reeks of a scam, similar to a "Free personality test" or "Love IQ" test online that is really just a way to gain valuable personal information, except instead of playing off social anxieties to trick people into taking a test they are playing off privacy anxieties to get people to divulge more information...
Looking at my data, it's so so so tempting to opt-out, but then again I'd rather see targeted ads than 'one crazy trick to get rid of my belly fat' ones....
This. I'd rather watch an engineer take a minute to sweat through his memorized lines about X company's latest chips in heavily accented English than spend 15 seconds watching the usual amalgamation of meaningless statements, slick graphics, and lowest-common-denominator jokes.
Say what you will about the creepyness of automatic profiling, but in my experience it has made some significant progress towards advancing advertising from a necessary evil to a genuine value-add.
> I'd rather watch an engineer take a minute to sweat through his memorized lines about X company's latest chips
Is that actually the kind of ads you see? I've been using AdBlock since forever, but I assumed all the ads were flashy commercials for everyone. Maybe my friends without AdBlock are just boring.
Likely true re: your friends. Most people's friends are. I know the ad he's referring to, and have enjoyed it enough that I've let it play through more than once rather than skip it.
Mine was pretty bad. They had some very basic pieces of public information wrong.
This is clearly not the same data I had when I used their web service at a startup I worked at in 2000. They had a service you could provide a phone number to and it would return a little story like this:
"Bob Smith from Portland, Oregon uses in-home pregnancy tests, drinks imported beer, and listens to alternative rock radio stations."
None of those sorts of rich details are in my data.
They have a total of 2 online purchases for me. One is in "art and antiques" and the other is in "bedding linens" I don't recall purchasing anything in either of those categories online. They don't have my current address (I moved about 2 months ago). They don't have my education level quite right. The information they have on my income is current, and I assume they got it from a credit card application.
As a budding CS major I had a job with Acxiom. Most of it involved running phone books through sheet fed scanners, collating a truly massive amount of publicly available information. A lot of work was done on a custom OCR engine to parse all of this data.
Indeed. I would have run CCleaner first and use IE (which I never use) to make sure they didn't get any new info out of me. The only thing they could get at that point is my IP address unless I went through a trusted VPN.
Can't authenticate me based on my information (steady address for 2+ years, on credit reports, drivers' license, etc)... and to fix this I can photograph and encrypt my DL/passport?
to see what others may know about your magazine subscriptions, enter your social here ___-__-____, and address here __________, (which we'll share with our trusted partners)
At the bottom of their new user signup page is a link to an "opt out" section. If believed, they allow you to install an online cookie and mail them forms to stop Acxiom from tracking you online and selling your data.
"instead of getting a great offer on a hotel package in your favorite vacation spot, you might see an ad for the latest, greatest weight loss solution."
Translation: "Fuck you, we'll show you obnoxious weight loss ads instead"
I also do that. I can tell you everything about you, if you want to test me, please send me:
Your full name.
Your date of birth.
your zip code. Your street. The number.
your social security number.
Your marital status. Please specify the sex of your kids and also their ages o I could contrast with my database better and inform you if you are wrong.
Your job.
This is a classic storyteller or talker with your ancestors trick.
That's a 300M population...today. Assuming avg US life expectancy of 75 years, that's another 4M in turnover for every year that they have data for, plus I assume records of another ~150-250M records from those that have only stayed in the US temporarily and aren't reflected in census numbers.
I just entered my info. The have my birthday wrong, think I am married and have a kid. They also got my credit card types wrong (should be the easiest thing to collect too), and were way off on my purchasing behavior. This is not that scary.
Don't do it! I entered all that information and it said I needed to manually authenticate. Basically, they want me to provide even more information. Can't opt out and I just gave them more info...
let me review this... an advertising company wants even more data about me... remind me those anti-virus software... let me scan your computer for free and boom even more spywares .... IP+browser info+SSN+full name+ location....that's gold !!! don't know how many people is going to complete the form but that's a great marketing campaign... scare people to create a sense of urgency...
An advertising company wants me to enter my name and address and make sure the database they sell has the correct information on me.. hmm... I think I'll pass.
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acxiom