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HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

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Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#51

Post by xnx »

biggestdummy wrote: post #42
gmmeyer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very useful for b2b people to know who is looking at your website and who might be good targets to reach out to. Knowing that Steve the SVP at Databricks is looking at your website vs cookie 1234 is a pretty key differentiator

From first-hand experience, B2B sellers do not get this information today. They typically get "signals" like "Company X is searching for product category Y" or "Company X is visiting your web site". And "Company X's CIO is John Smith - here's his phone number". But nobody that I've seen claims to offer individual names of web site visitors.

Services like retention.com provide email addresses for otherwise anonymous site visitors based on information provided to them by their "publisher network".

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#52

Post by moron4hire »

Xorlev wrote: post #18
nightpool wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small piece of nuance here is that a lot of the times they're not selling your email address, they're hashing it and using it as an identifier for targeting on other sites (so that two sites that both have your email address can coordinate to sell you ads, but sites that don't already have your email address don't learn anything new).

Except it's also trivial to buy or produce tables of pre-hashed emails, so this cloak of "oh we don't know who you are, it's a hash!" is usually just lipservice.

This is one of the things that drives me nuts when hardcore privacy advocates start wading into browser feature discussions and complaining about things being used to fingerprint users.

I mean, can eye-tracking in a WebXR session be used to identify users? Yes, clearly that is a possibility. But will the addition of eye-tracking increase the identifiability of users? No, not in the least, because users are already identifiable by means that involve core browser features.

But frequently, the "privacy advocates" win and we're left with a web platform that has a lot of weird, missing functionally in comparison to native apps, pushing developers to either compromise on functionality or develop a native app. Compromising is bad for users. And developing a native app could can be bad for the developer, if one considers their existing investment in web technologies. Or both the developer and users, when one considers the vig that app stores charge, or the editorial control that app stores enforce over socially-controversial-yet-not-actually-illegal topics. Or just users when one considers the fact that the app stores just hand app developers a user identity without even making them work for it with fingerprinting.

And often, the voices that are loudest in defence of "privacy" are browser developers that also just so happen to be employed by said app store vendors.

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#53

Post by tacone »

fooster wrote: post #26
thiago_fm wrote: post #12

Clearbit's product wasn't that good anymore and they had just got the old CEO back as far as I can remember, they've sold it in a good time then. I wonder if it was a good purchase for HubSpot though, but who am I to judge those M&A's :-)

> just got the old CEO back as far as I can remember hum? The original CEO is developing https://reflect.app/

Interesting, it does not look to be ready to be used on mobile though.

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#54

Post by CaveTech »

jgraettinger1 wrote: post #22
Xorlev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's also trivial to buy or produce tables of pre-hashed emails, so this cloak of "oh we don't know who you are, it's a hash!" is usually just lipservice.

They're not literally passing around the hash. Holders of hash(email) browser cookie associations are heavily incentivized for both regulatory and also competitive reasons to not blast that information around the internet -- or even to let direct partners A & B identify overlaps without their being in the middle. When passing identifiers, there's generally some combination of lookup tables, per-distribution salted ha…

I think this is generally false in most instances. All advertising pixels use unsalted sha1 hashes over https.

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#55

Post by ashconnor »

tebbers wrote: post #48
ashconnor wrote: post #34

Congrats to Alex MacCaw et al.

He's a great guy and deserves the success. I reached out to him in 2013ish about US immigration and he was extremely nice and helpful. Check out his new startup, Reflect Notes, seems to be getting some traction.

I remember that blog post. Very useful. Not much has changed since unfortunately!

https://underdog.io/blog/engineers-guide-to-us-visas

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#56

Post by thiago_fm »

kwerk wrote: post #40
thiago_fm wrote: post #12

Clearbit's product wasn't that good anymore and they had just got the old CEO back as far as I can remember, they've sold it in a good time then. I wonder if it was a good purchase for HubSpot though, but who am I to judge those M&A's :-)

one of the co-founders (former CMO > COO > interim CEO) Matt Sornson came back to be CEO.

^ that, my mistake.

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#57

Post by twicetwice »

ethbr1 wrote: post #29
xnx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Meta and Google are much less shady about this.

Not really... they're just vertically integrated and have their own ad networks. Consequently, they're not protecting data because they care about privacy -- they're protecting data because the wider they share the raw data, the less value it (their product) is. It's economic self-interest, not ethics. If they didn't have ad networks, they'd sell anything and everything in a heartbeat.

Be that as it may, their object-level behavior is still far less shady. And in fact this is an argument that it is good that they exist, because in the counterfactual world where they don't, their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information.

I used to be all gung-ho about being anti-FAANG, those evil privacy violators, but having now talked to friends who have worked at places like FB and Google, their internal data security practices are far more stringent than I had imagined (my friends complain about how difficult these rules make their jobs!). And yeah, sure, they are scooping up as much information about you as they can, and I'm not a big fan of that fact. But I have been convinced that they are actually somewhat decent stewards of that information, and the alternative is far worse.

All that being said, this is a pretty loosely-held belief, and all the surveillance and so on is quite icky to me. I'm still trying to slowly de-google my life and all that, just with a bit less paranoia and urgency.

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#58

Post by lancesells »

strombofulous wrote: post #14
have_faith wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI can send the outreach messages, and then AI can respond. Then we can all go and retire on a beach while the AI's just bounce off of each ad infinitium.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough beaches to go around, so we will still have to pick winners and losers

That's what the Vision Pro is for.

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#59

Post by lancesells »

xnx wrote: post #19
hilbertseries wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is correct. Meta and Google don't sell direct access to your data. They sell advertising targeting you, based on your personal data. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell users email address to a data broker under GDPR.

Right. Meta and Google are much less shady about this.

Outside of using a Meta product or a Google product it's all completely shady. I shouldn't be tracked going to the DMV website or purchasing something online or using a dating app or going into a store or...

Re: HubSpot Acquires Clearbit

#60

Post by omneity »

Eumenes wrote: post #16
netcraft wrote: post #6

> Now, imagine that once prospects’ and customers’ data are in HubSpot, our platform actively monitors those customers for buying intents. Not just based on direct engagements within the HubSpot platform, but also based on customers’ activities outside of HubSpot and around the web. And, when it’s time to reach out, imagine using generative A.I. powered by all of this rich data to create personal messages. That will…

> A.I. powered > personal messages

Read customized at scale to elicit familiar responses from the recipients. So Gibson-esque.
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