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RapLeaf Is Back and Bad As Ever

Posted by timothy on from the making-a-list-checking-it-an-infinite-number-of-times dept.

itwbennett writes "Privacy blogger Dan Tynan opted out of data aggregator RapLeaf back in 2010 — and wrote about it. At the time, opting out seemed to work well enough. But fast forward a couple of years and ... they're baaaack. While testing a privacy service called Safe Shepherd, Tynan discovered that 'not only [is he] not opted out of RapLeaf's database, they've also gathered far more information about [him] than they had before.' And it's a pretty good bet some of the data came from Facebook apps, which is a practice that the company was slapped for in 2010 and claimed to no longer do."

1 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Google never went away by drinkydoh · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Back in the time ad companies like DoubleClick existed on a broad swath of Web sites, so they were in a unique position to get a 30,000 foot view of your Web surfing habits. All they had to do was drop a cookie file on your hard drive. Whenever you visited a site containing a DoubleClick ad, it checked your hard drive for that cookie, and added that web site and any information associated with it to its profile of you.

    But Doubleclick couldn’t actually identify you personally; it identified your browser, which could be used by anyone in your household. And (after a lot of pressure from privacy wonks who were also not your mother) it and other ad companies like it offered you the opportunity to opt out of being tracked, though it never really worked all that well.

    Fast forward ten years. Doubleclick is now owned by Google. So-called “behavioral marketing” is all the rage in Net advertising. People are now sharing information about themselves on social networks like it’s going out of style. And companies like Rapleaf and Google are there vacuuming it all up and spitting it out to advertisers – supposedly anonymously, though now we know better.