Axios codebook full#

In order to reverse engineer the identifying info on the site I saw this morning, I ran through each of the their third party Drift chat APIs quickly and determined that the identifying information on my IP is most likely the data coming from Clearbit.

I’ve previously written about privacy and tracking online 10 so I’ll just leave you with the fun fact that folks are now attaching beacons to identify you on everything from churches to those little roadside political signs 11 so the tracking is not just online, it’s in real space in real time 12. I’m not going dig into all that here for the sake of focusing just on the little feature I ran into this morning. If you’re following along, you might have noticed the recent attempt by the US Government to impose restrictions on encryption 9.

I suspect that it won’t just be IP addresses for long as the telecommunication providers and governments make strides in pushing to identify the devices on their networks 7 for regulation and legal purposes even though vendors are had been trying to randomize those addresses 8. The are vast amounts of resources being put into closing down the ‘last mile’ of the anonymity of the internet. If you then combine that data with that of the big name companies like IBM and Equifax who compile and sell personal data, then you’ve got a bunch of data-points originating from a single web requests 6. I say person whereas most of the typical language about the tracking is either customer, consumer, market, etc. Combining this data into or alongside of another system such as Segment, Saleforce, Google Analytics, or Facebook Pixel can create a powerful dataset on any person.

Drift is able to add datapoint integrations with MadKudu, Demandbase, 6Sense, and Clearbit 5. The chat feature on is powered by Drift 3 which offers a ton of integrations and is a sophisticated project 4. Firstly, I can see why the IPO gained so much traction and I’ll give the companies involved kudos for being able to do so. So, of course I’m intrigued and I set about to reverse engineer the feature. The site chatbot misidentified me as “Jobcluster” which turns out to be an employment agency in Florida. I headed to my desktop, changed my IP address, and tried it again using an IP set to Central America. I’ve previous figured out and am pretty well versed in all kinds of methodologies for various privacy invading tracking techniques used by the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook etc, but this one is a bit different because I was on a mobile device using a browser in incognito mode so it wasn’t cookie or tracker based. I’ve know about this practice for years and I’ve seen the exponential growth in the arena, but today is the first time, I’ve actually had it happen to me.

Axios codebook full#

However, this time the chat bot correctly identifies me with my full name. In doing so, I headed over to, scrolled down a bit, and viola… the inevitable new-fangled chat-box appears. I wanted to dig a bit into their business model since I’ve been thinking about reworking the invoicing application I use. While reading the news this morning I noticed that the 1 IPO managed to gain 60% 2.