When a company you’ve never heard of makes you aware they’re processing your information (as required by law), if you’ve never heard of them you should do some research on them, right? Including checking out their business practices. Well today a company, Infynd, did this to us.
They say they will gather any available data on a company, and publish it in a database for their clients to use, so it appears that they take information about companies, their staff and corporate structure and then release that information as a chargeable service.
Several things about this business are suspicious, including their “Live Chat”, it says “We’re Online! Talk to us today”, but it’s just an auto responding bot, with incredibly poor canned messages. They show partial information for a few companies in their “directory”, but when you try and go through to find what information they may have on you, after about 5 or 6 page clicks (viewing only 2 rows of companies at a time) you’re force redirected to a sign up page.
I object to this kind of processing. You’ll email me and tell me that you’ll use all available data, including some “inferred” information (for example, they will ‘assume’ email addresses for people based on what they think a corporate structure is), and publish that to their “paying” customer base.
Although, what is arguably good, is that their inferred information isn’t right, when attempting to live chat with them I used the information they’d already inferred since I will not be helping them profit from what I feel is essentially stalking companies employees to sell that information at a profit.
Quoting their “Privacy Policy” email
We also hold data in respect of your employer company such as its name, alias, size, revenue, social handles, website and industry. In some case we estimate individuals’ net worth based on publically available data (for example, the individual’s employment history or if such individual previously sold shares in a company). Where you have moved jobs, we may hold your previous employers and previous titles.
In order to provide certain aspects of its services, InFynd requires a business email address to be recorded against profiles in its database. Where InFynd does not have the business email address of a profile, it may generate a business email address based on the email address structure understood to be implemented by the employer company.
Infynd Privacy Policy email
Sounds nice? Not really.
