[minimaxir]

Presumably, they have some preexisting database that maps email addresses to personal information. Their Privacy page, however, is not transparent how exactly they got this data:

> Broadly speaking, we collect information in three ways: (1) when you provide it directly to us, (2) when we obtain information about you or your company through trusted third parties or indexing systems, and (3) passively through technology such as “cookies”.

This is a disconcerting use of "secret sauce," particularly since email addresses have the same weight nowadays as usernames.

[prezjordan]

Maybe clearbit? Which you can opt out of here: https://claim.clearbit.com/claim

I did this a few weeks ago and magic signup does not work for my email address.

[andygcook]

Alex McCaw mentioned in Clearbit's launch post earlier this year that Svbtle is using their API to auto populate their sign up form: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/clearbit

My guess is that Magic is using Clearbit's API as a base, then layering on their own scraped data sources as well, which is a pretty common strategy for these types of APIs.

[xirdstl]

Probably not. That clearbit form tells me that they don't have my email address, but my information was pre-populated into Svbtle when I used that same address.

[burkaman]

I got the same thing the first time, but I did it again and it sent me an email to claim my account. Maybe their site got overwhelmed by HN requests? Not sure what happened.

[angryasian]

same thing with me. Somehow pulled my information from twitter.

[notlisted]

If you don't want to provide clearbit with additional information (e.g. location), it might be useful to remove yourself with this link via a VPN or hide.me

[Xorlev]

https://www.fullcontact.com/privacy/ If it's coming through our FullContact Person API, you can claim your profile or opt out here.

[herval]

Does anyone know if Clearbit is just a frontend for Fullcontact? I tried both recently, and all I get from Clearbit is basically a subset of Fullcontact (plus some added data eg lat/lng)...

[nostromo]

Or it might be Pipl.

Opt out for Pipl is here: https://pipl.com/directory/remove/

[eridius]

That link doesn't seem to provide opt-out, it just provides a way to request the deletion of specific records. But you have to find the page for the record before you can request it to be deleted.

[nostromo]

Yeah, it sucks that they don't make it easier.

[tomasien]

It's Clearbit - and btw way more data than this is available on you based on an email address. Scary in a lot of ways for sure.

[karangoeluw]

How is it that clearbit charges $99/2500 reqs, while magic is charging 1/5th of that?

[rgbrgb]

Probably a caching layer on their side.

[eclipxe]

Sounds like a TOS violation

[tedmiston]

From https://clearbit.com/pricing:

> How long can I retain the data?

> Forever! We have a very liberal data licensing policy.

[tomasien]

Clearbit uses this as an example in blogs, etc

[swang]

Their secret sauce is a third party API.