Rapleaf and the Facebook Privacy Ruckus: Tech News ? Updated: In the analog world of J.Crew catalogs and credit card purchases, credit bureaus like Experian built profiles on most of us. In the digital world, a new kind of digital data aggregator is spreading its tentacles on the web. The latest privacy-related dust-up at Facebook, sparked by a WSJ story, might be making Facebook the target of the consumer ire, but in my opinion, the real story centers around San Francisco-based Internet information aggregation company called Rapleaf. In their story, Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler of WSJ write: In this case, however, the Journal found that one data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. The funny part is that Rapleaf, doesn’t need any of the user ID stuff. Rapleaf’s influence on the web is only increasing. Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Search Engine Land: Must Read News About Search Marketing & Search Engines justSignal Tweet I saw this on TechCrunch earlier today and thought it was an awesome add to my big data series. Jeff Jonas is clearly a big thinker and I agree with almost everything he says. The only thing I take issue with is the recurring theme in this interview that Big Data is primarily about… Tweet Both hiring and job seeking are about people. Tweet I don’t get it… I really don’t. Tweet Following up on yesterday’s Big Data post.
Rapportive Leverage Sales Navigator insights anytime you send an email. View rich LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next. This Chrome extension is available in two flavors, “Lite” for free LinkedIn members and “Premium” for LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscribers. Sales Navigator Lite for Gmail will let you See rich LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in your Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next Mention icebreakers, including shared connections, experiences, and interests, to build rapport with your contacts Hover over any email address anywhere in your message to quickly view their profile to stay informed on who’s who With a Sales Navigator subscription, this extension will unlock additional premium features: Save contacts as leads in your Sales Navigator account Use TeamLink to see if prospects are connected to your colleagues and get a warm introduction
TechCrunch Social Media Monitoring and Analysis with Alterian SM2 (Formerly Techrigy) Do you know the process your customers take to buy and connect with you? Their journey is often filled with many steps, stops and starts. What you do to help them along the way makes all the difference in gaining a competitive foothold. Taking action to improve the experiences your customers have within that journey can convert them from shoppers to customers, and then to advocates. Too often customers don’t ask for what they want, and rarely do they behave in the way you expect them to; however, they are telling others directly in social media. Taking this view of your customer’s world lets you make better informed and faster decisions about value propositions, brand strategies, and, more importantly, how to engage customers.
Rapportive Makes Gmail More Useful: Business Collaboration News « Rapportive is a free browser plugin (available as both a Firefox add-on and as a Chrome extension) for that replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc). It provides similar functionality to Xobni, the popular plugin for Outlook that we’ve covered previously, and MailBrowser, a third-party Gmail extension app that I wrote about back in January. Installation is simple and takes less than a couple of minutes, and as it’s just a browser plugin it provides a neater solution than MailBrowser, because it doesn’t require you running a separate application for it to work. Once it’s set up, clicking on an email will pull up the sender’s biographical information in Gmail’s right-hand sidebar (where adverts are normally served) and links to their social media accounts; you can also use it to store private notes on each contact. (via The Next Web)
Rapleaf’s Web: How You Are Profiled on the Web: Tech News « Earlier, I posted about San Francisco-based Internet information aggregator Rapleaf, a service that collects, sorts and repackages data about many of us who spend an inordinate amount of time on the Internet. I started poking around and discovered many startups that are using data from Rapleaf, but it’s not just startups. Just take a look at this article on Rapleaf in Fast Company from last year: By accessing its database of 378,968,953 consumer email profiles, banks, retailers, and anti-fraud firms (all of which it counts among its clients) Rapleaf can quickly confirm legitimate customers and weed out scammers, cutting verification costs and improving the user experience. “Companies spend as much as $100 getting customers to their site. The goal is to filter out the bad people and keep as many good people as possible,” (Joel) Jewitt (Rapleaf’s VP of Business Development) says. How Rapleaf Works To better understand how, exactly, Rapleaf works, I did some investigating. Rapportive.
Xobni – Business Collaboration Solutions: WebWorkerDaily Vinod Khosla, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and formerly of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has made a fortune out of betting on companies that tackle really big problems. Some of his bets – Juniper Networks, for instance – have paid off handsomely. Others have been marginally successful, at least from a financial standpoint. He continues the tradition with his new venture fund, Khosla Ventures, investing in clean tech and alternative energy start-ups. He is taking a similar approach to his InfoTech investments as well. According to Alarm: Clock, the company has raised $1.5 million of a $4.26 million Series A round, led by Khosla Ventures. Our email inboxes continue to spiral out of control, beginning to resemble New York City when the garbage workers are on strike. Xobni, wants to solve all these problems, and indeed has lofty goals, as outlined on their website.
MailBrowser: A Plugin to Manage Gmail Contacts and Attachments: Business Collaboration News « If you’re a Gmail user who’s coveted third-party Outlook email productivity add-ons like Xobni or Gist, you might like to check out Webyog’s new MailBrowser. It’s a free plugin for Firefox and IE (with Chrome support on its way) that aims to extend the contact and attachment management capabilities of Gmail. Getting started is straightforward: Download and install the plugin (versions available for both Windows and Mac) and give it your Gmail account credentials (which are only stored locally on your machine, as it’s not a web app). It uses IMAP to connect to your Gmail and Google Apps accounts; once connected, it trawls through your emails looking for contacts and attachments. As soon as it’s finished indexing your emails, you’re ready to go. MailBrowser sits as a sidebar in your browser that you can expand or collapse as needed, and sports two main tabs: “Contacts” and “Files.” Have you tried MailBrowser?
Referrer URLs and Privacy Risks | Rapleaf The Wall Street Journal’s recent article in the "What They Know" series discussed the problem of Facebook IDs being passed to ad networks. This is a serious potential privacy risk – and most Facebook applications are impacted by this issue. The underlying issue is with a piece of the HTTP header called the referrer URL. We recognize that referrer URLs are a major industry-wide problem with the structure of internet security, so Rapleaf has taken extra steps to strip out identifying information from referrer URLs. When we discovered that Facebook ids were being passed to ad networks by applications that we work with, we immediately researched the cause and implemented a solution to cease the transmissions. We are committed to working with the industry to fix these issues, and all issues that may emerge in the future from this complex ecosystem. Below are more details about referrer URLs and steps the industry should take to eliminate the privacy risk. What are "Referrer URLs"?
HTTP referrer HTTP referer (originally a misspelling of referrer) is an HTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage (i.e. the URI or IRI) that linked to the resource being requested. By checking the referer, the new webpage can see where the request originated. In the most common situation this means that when a user clicks a hyperlink in a web browser, the browser sends a request to the server holding the destination webpage. The request includes the referer field, which indicates the last page the user was on (the one where they clicked the link). Referer logging is used to allow websites and web servers to identify where people are visiting them from, for promotional or statistical purposes.[1] Origin of the term referer[edit] Details[edit] When visiting a webpage, the referrer or referring page is the URL of the previous webpage from which a link was followed. More generally, a referer is the URL of a previous item which led to this request. Referer hiding[edit] References[edit]
Facebook in Privacy Breach (Wall Street Journal) At this moment, the must-read stories in technology are scattered across hundreds of news sites and blogs. That's far too much for any reader to follow. Fortunately, Techmeme arranges all of these links into a single, easy-to-scan page. Our goal is to become your tech news site of record. Story selection is accomplished via computer algorithm extended with direct human editorial input.