<story><title>You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.</title><url>http://42floors.com/blog/youre-not-anonymous-i-know-your-name-email-and-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsobers</author><text>HubSpot (and pretty much any other marketing automation tool) has this feature, too.  They lookup company name and location by IP address and build an anonymous &quot;prospect&quot; record representing each visitor so that salespeople and marketers can detect whether prospects from a given company are hitting the site for information.&lt;p&gt;The second a prospect submits a web form, all that previous web activity is tied to their email address (and any other info you collected via the form).  You now have a real lead.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t see any privacy issues with this.&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;i&gt;would&lt;/i&gt; see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query &quot;Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?&quot; and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.&lt;p&gt;The moment you start giving my PII to a company that I didn&apos;t voluntarily give it to is when I feel a line has been crossed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulgb</author><text>&amp;#62; What I would see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query &quot;Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?&quot; and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.&lt;p&gt;That appears to be exactly what&apos;s happening. The email mentions &quot;access to our entire network of identified data ([...] we can identify any visitor [...] if that person has filled out a web form from any other website we are tracking)&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.</title><url>http://42floors.com/blog/youre-not-anonymous-i-know-your-name-email-and-company/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsobers</author><text>HubSpot (and pretty much any other marketing automation tool) has this feature, too.  They lookup company name and location by IP address and build an anonymous &quot;prospect&quot; record representing each visitor so that salespeople and marketers can detect whether prospects from a given company are hitting the site for information.&lt;p&gt;The second a prospect submits a web form, all that previous web activity is tied to their email address (and any other info you collected via the form).  You now have a real lead.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t see any privacy issues with this.&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;i&gt;would&lt;/i&gt; see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query &quot;Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?&quot; and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.&lt;p&gt;The moment you start giving my PII to a company that I didn&apos;t voluntarily give it to is when I feel a line has been crossed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darrennix</author><text>According to the sales rep, their tracking capability goes far beyond ip lookup.  It explicitly involves saving form data from site A and sharing that personal information with site B.</text></comment>