HN Explorer

Ask HN: How can someone find my LinkedIn just from visiting their site?

5 points by flylib ↗ HN
I visited a site earlier today while I was googling for something, visited one page and left the site, didn't sign up for anything and later tonight I noticed that someone from the company looked at my profile on LinkedIn, did I get tracked through cookies somehow?

5 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] thread
doubt_me
would it be cool to share the site?

I have never heard of this happening

flylib
NTT DATA
doubt_me
Well I visited them in incognito mode and it took it a day or 2 but someone from the company looked at my linkedin.

How is this even possible? wtf

pbnjay
I cannot remember the name of it, but I definitely read a post somewhere about a company X that does this as a service. In short, company A who you have an existing account with shares your info with X, who saves it to a cookie. Company B which you visited does the same. Both of them can ask X for info about a site visitor by virtue of the sharing policy...

I find the idea pretty disgusting.

27182818284
You're right. Ugh I can't remember either, but I vaguely remember learning about it on Hacker News.

It was nothing technically illegal or anything malicious, it was just normal web-cookie tracking in overdrive. Then the company whose page you hit pays the tracking company for the information.

There have been universities that looked into it for their admissions pages, but decided against it.