How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation

http://maxklein.posterous.com/how-to-convert-email-addresses-into-name-age

by maxklein • 17 years ago

144 64 17 years ago

maxklein.posterous.com

yannis2• 17 years ago

Simple strategy .. but so borderline ethical.

maxklein7• 17 years ago

I've been thinking about this since I discovered it - is it not facebook being unethical here? They give full access to the personal info of a person given their email address. Their new 'privacy' terms is basically about nobody having any privacy.

Small and agile business like mine will capitalise quickly on this info, but sooner or later, big companies like coca-cola will also see nothing wrong with storing public information that a user has 'chosen' to make public.

yannis2• 17 years ago

Max, I thought you would have given it a lot of thought and so did I, that is why I called it borderline. I am with you when you say that these persons have opted to allow their information to go public and that Facebook effectively has let its users down. Anyway running a business is tough and marketing at some point in time was compared with guerilla warfare:) (now is JavaScript!)

Semiapies7• 17 years ago

If the question is "Am you being unethical?" and your response is, "But isn't the real wrong being done by someone else?", then the answer is "Yes, you are".

rsheridan6• 17 years ago

Is it really unethical? Everybody knows that part of their facebook is viewable to the world, and they can change it and make it private if they want.

I don't this tactic makes spamming any more or less ethical.

physcab3• 17 years ago

I don't believe Facebook made this decision lightly. I'd like to believe that if they found that by releasing this information it placed their users in jeopardy, they wouldn't have done it. Call me naive if you want.

I didn't pay much attention to the whole privacy controls thing. I assume that I am just like millions of other people who just clicked the "Close" button quickly so I could check my wall posts. With that said, I basically operate under the assumption that whatever information I put on that site, its going to be broadcast out to the world. Just like I know that whatever comments I post here on HN can be searched on Google and read by whomever. I think most people in my generation know this.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

It is only unethical if you assume that most people don't understand Facebook and privacy controls.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

which they've done a reasonable job of promoting.

A larger and larger number of my non-techy friends are locking up their Facebook accounts.

Whether this is just because the default settings have changed to be more restrictive I don't know (when they did the updates mine tried to get me to swap from "fully open" to "friends only" so I am not sure their algorithm for suggested settings is very good)

physcab3• 17 years ago

Think about this from the perspective of the user though. When I go on Facebook, I expect that whatever information I put on the site is public, regardless of privacy controls (btw, I didn't change any privacy settings when they made a fuss about it because I didn't care/ didn't understand what the difference was from before). If people don't want this information broadcasted, why post it in the first place?

As an example, consider the "relationship status" feature. I don't know about you, but for most of my friends it was a running joke that you weren't "official" until you listed your status on your profile. So I think most people understand that their information is public.

physcab3• 17 years ago

What's the unethical component to this? To me, it all depends on what you do with this information. If you use the demographic info simply to understand your users and improve the service for them, then why is that bad? Perhaps you realize after looking at this demographic info that your assumptions about your userbase are wrong and you need to adjust your offerings or cater to a minority that you neglected. On the other hand, if you use that info to discriminate, then ya, that would be unethical.

And if you think giving this list our to MTurkers is unethical, then I have to ask why as well? I think you have to ask yourself that by giving away this information, does it open up your users to vulnerability? Would you be enabling unethical behavior on the part of someone else, thereby making you guilty by association?

For the record, I downvoted you because with a subject this sensitive, you should explain your position...not just make a quick, semi-accusatory statement. We need more comments with substance on HN.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

Pretty much every service pretty much indexes you by email address. If you can get someones primary email you can track them down on all these sites; sure Facebook does a particularly bad job of keeping certain personal data private but it's not alone :)

ramanujan• 17 years ago

The other service that does something like this is rapleaf.com:

http://www.rapleaf.com/downloads/sample_free_screening_repor...

I'm not very trusting of them after that scam email thing they did a while back (basically linked all your social accounts together with your email, and then emailed you and told you someone was checking up on you, and of course you were alarmed that the account for Friendster was linked to Flickr and all your other services).

I'd be loath to give rapleaf a bulk upload of data, as I wouldn't trust them not to resell the email addresses. Still, I could see how the information could be useful (e.g. for advertising buys) even if only presented in aggregate.

pierrefar• 17 years ago

In the UK, I'm sure the Data Protection Act will kick in. It doesn't prohibit you from storing personally identifying data, but it puts restrictions on what you can do with it and how to interact with it.

IANAL, so take this comment as a simple "be careful with the law" that applies to where you operate.

samuel2• 17 years ago

Probably, it's illegal at every EU country which implements the 95/46/EC directive(http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...)

maxklein7• 17 years ago

That text is pretty long, can you summarize the parts relevant to this for us?

mattwdelong3• 17 years ago

An awesome start up allowing you to do exactly this and more is http://flowtown.com. Their main feature is allowing you to convert email address into social profiles, you can really learn a lot about a person by what they post online - a great way to learn your customer base online.

ebloch5• 17 years ago

Thank you for the love Matt ;-)

Businesses that care about their customers / users / clients are the ones that will win in 2010 and beyond. I want to be apart of this future and it's the basis for why @danmartell and I founded Flowtown.

Semiapies7• 17 years ago

Businesses like that "care" about their customers like ranchers "care" about cattle.

I don't suppose you're going to publish a list of your clients? Maybe for a fee?

DTrejo• 17 years ago

Do you store emails entered into your demo?

Semiapies7• 17 years ago

"So you have somehow begged, borrowed or stolen an email list of 1000 users who you believe are interested in your new service."

If you had to scrounge around to find my name and other details, or otherwise do something besides ask me, I'm not interested, just so you know.

If I ever get an email with my name from a company I've never given information to, I look to see any indication of how they got it - and then delete that email.

I'm sure the people whose eyes are lighting up at this idea don't care that some of their targets won't like this bit of cyber-stalking. I can only hope those who use it get more resistance out of it than responses.

maxklein7• 17 years ago

The "evil" in this method is that you will never know the company has your email, because they will get your info off your facebook profile without having to contact you. Facebook will give the info to anyone who has your email and they won't notify you.

Semiapies7• 17 years ago

The disrespect and lack of ethics is not limited to Facebook by this behavior. The fact that Facebook is insecure does not make exploiting Facebook's insecurity any more ethical or proper.

brianto20102• 17 years ago

The point of this service is not to contact you. If they already have the e-mails, then they won't need this service; they will e-mail/spam you anyway. It's in place because...

> Such information can help you correct course before you are too invested in a particular idea you have.

Semiapies7• 17 years ago

I'm quite aware. The purpose is to get information about me through exploiting a service. You can put it in a little targeted spam to me to try to get past spam filters and get a favorable reaction.

It's snooping, and it's reprehensible.

tobtoh2• 17 years ago

With the recent FB changes, I always thought that marketers getting your details through this method was the least of your worries - I figure identify theft is the bigger worry!

maxklein7• 17 years ago

Think about it rationally. There are 300 million facebook users. How many people are out there who want to steal your identity? What are the odds of those people actually stumbling upon YOUR profile? What is the damage that they will do, and how much of that damage are you going to be liable for?

Worrying about identity theft is as rational as worrying about getting your eyes gouged out by crow - yes, it can happen - but fact of the matter is that it's not very likely to happen.

tobtoh2• 17 years ago

I disagree ... that's the equivalent of say leaving your front door open and not worrying about being robbed because there are 300 million doors in the city.

Sure you are unlikely to be targeted specifically, but once someone has decided to commit identity theft, you don't want to be the easy target.

And 10 FB users or 300 million is kinda irrelevant with all the automated tools/scripts that are available these days - searching for the 1 vulnerable person out of 300 million is a relatively trivial task. They will 'stumble' upon your profile not because they randomly picked you from 300 million, but because they ran a script that identified you as an easy target.

gcb• 17 years ago

the part that acares me the most is that he is willing to go around giving the list to anyone

petewarden4• 17 years ago

There's a little-known world of commercial services like Rapleaf that give marketers information from a list of email addresses. I wrote a test service to show you what information's available on your address:

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/12/what-can...

The scary thing is that if they can get your full name and rough location, it's then often possible to get a full address (see whitepages.com for a consumer-facing example). That then ties into other datasets that have information on income, occupation, marital status, etc for every household in the US.

njharman• 17 years ago

> The scary thing is ...

Sorry, I remain not scared.

petewarden4• 17 years ago

What could possibly go wrong when there's an easily accessible database of detailed information on every individual? Move along, nothing to see here.

ams6110• 17 years ago

Yeah, really this is NOT anything new. Direct Marketing service companies have been providing this for years. Back in the mid 1990s we were sending one such company reels of 1/2" tape with names and addresses, and getting back reports of age/income etc. distribution.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

Agreed; speaking personally anyone willing to spend the 10 minutes with a whois database service, my email address and a little digging on my sites could find out pretty much every address I've ever lived at.

(bonus points if someone does it and gets all 3 :))

But I know that data exists - and for now I am happy for people to discover it about me.

Speaking for non-techy types, though, it is something to be concerned about. Less so for marketers as things like stalkers and fraudsters etc. It's worth raising these issues gently to try and encourage people to understand what data is accessible about them - and ensure their comfortable with that.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

It didn't know anything about any address I threw at it, so I feel pretty secure. And I'm as public as it probably gets, I make absolutely no effort to hide my identity or whereabouts.

petewarden4• 17 years ago

The address j@ww.com you mention in your profile gives a hit for an Amazon account in Kansas:

http://web.mailana.com/labs/findbyemail/index.php?email=j%40...

Doubt that's you though, probably just an MD5 clash, since it's a long way from the Netherlands?

I only see one other check in my access log from the same IP that checked for your address about an hour ago; mishu<snip>.com. That did find a flickr account, though it appears to be private, so not much info there.

petewarden4• 17 years ago

I've just released the code for this as open source:

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/01/how-to-f...

jfarmer3• 17 years ago

As far as I can tell this is the "trick" that is the basis for Flowtown's business.

http://www.flowtown.com/

ebloch5• 17 years ago

Being completely bootstrapped we've been focused on revenue since day 1 and our "trick" of turning emails into social profiles is our minimum monetizable product.

The current iteration of Flowtown is nowhere close to our final vision: helping businesses scale caring.

We launched with an MVP that had even less features than today's iteration (product is just 9 weeks old).

jfarmer3• 17 years ago

Well, ok. This trick is the basis for the current version of your product, or perhaps "current business."

Is that fair? Or are you doing something other than, say, scraping http://www.facebook.com/search/?ref=ffs&q=farmerje@uchic... when I type in my email address? (At least WRT Facebook; other networks would naturally have different tactics.)

You don't need to be defensive. Every network is bootstrapped off another network. If you can get away with it, get away with it for as long as possible, but make sure you have an escape plan.

I assume that's what you're doing. Am I wrong?

That's not meant as a challenge, BTW. If I misunderstand your current product then the record should be corrected.

maxklein7• 17 years ago

Update from a reddit comment: Use this url - http://www.facebook.com/search/?ref=ffs&q=name@domain.co... and screenscrape for even more spammy goodness.

How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation

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