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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Completely incidental to the tragedy and it feels morbid to get something else entirely out of it when this is how it came to my attention, like a moral fruit of the poisonous tree situation I'm babby's-first conflicted over, but...

The passengers in the horrific Learjet crash in Palm Beach yesterday were the founder and his family of a wildly evil startup I was previously unaware of called RB2B (do not click that link without reading the following):

Identify 70-80% of your website visitors with RB2B. Get names, LinkedIn profiles and business emails of anonymous visitors

Beware that this exists and is apparently already in broad use. It obviously always could have and you would be foolish to not have it in the back of your mind, but I would have thought something so straightforwardly this would be restricted to (and require!) the darker corners of things and be somehow illegal. No:

Over 100,000+ websites use RB2B to identify the actual people visiting their site

RB2B identifies 70-80% of website traffic when person-level and company-level ID are combined. Customers typically see 30-40% of visitors identified at the person level (US only) and an additional 30-40% at the company level through RB2B's partnership with Demandbase. See how RB2B + Demandbase works.

Partly. RB2B's Person-Level ID is US-only technology with a US-only database, so it will not identify individuals located outside the US (for GDPR and CCPA compliance). Company-Level ID, through RB2B's partnership with Demandbase, is global. Companies based outside the US can use Person-Level ID on their US traffic, and it is compliant. Read the compliance page.

RB2B matches visitors against a fully-permissioned publisher network using a combination of 1st and 3rd party cookies, device IDs and IP addresses, plus Demandbase's proprietary reverse-IP lookup network for company-level ID. Once a visitor is identified, RB2B sends them to your CRM or other tools where you can trigger workflows: add to a lead score, start automated outreach, or alert a rep in Slack.

It's just your residential IP paired with your Google/Microsoft/Meta information that they bought plus a cookie. It only works on the proportion of users you'd expect that to work on. Unless you are on a corporate machine in which case it just identifies your company by the IP.

So it looks evil but the bigger scoop is it's a scam like most other b2b saas. Not at all worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That's the more banal evil that you can get everywhere.

It only works on the proportion of users you'd expect that to work on

Can you expand on this? My expectations may not match yours.

I would expect that with sufficiently low morals, high effort, and no legal restrictions, this could almost always be almost everybody, at least who wasn't making a truly extraordinary effort otherwise.

Corporate users like RB2B is targeting tend to be very easy to track.

At the organization level, most companies above a certain size have their own ASNs, so the IP addresses they use are a matter of public record. A lot of analytics tools can tell you when someone visits your website from Wells Fargo's corporate network using the same trivial database lookup that "what is my IP" websites use to tell you the name of your ISP.

On an individual level, a lot of corporate devices are mandated to use configurations like Chrome with no ad-blocker, or a version of Edge that leaks your email address to any website that asks, that are easy targets. You can just do the most basic ad-tech strategy of getting a bunch of crappy SaaS marketing websites to add your script to Google Tag Manager, setting a third-party cookie, and waiting until you can grab the user's identity from one of the websites. (Or as @dailydogma meat-proxied below, you can contract with a network of crappy ad-tech companies that all do that.)

Privacy-conscious normies usually manage to evade this by using some combination of a browser that blocks third-party cookies, an ad-blocker that blocks Google Tag Manager, and a shared CGNAT or VPN IP address. You can try to work around this, but it has tradeoffs like making your tracking script much harder for businesses to install, or producing weird side effects that power-users and corporate security departments will find suspicious (like briefly activating audio playback or port-scanning their internal network). There are also diminishing returns, since Apple and Mozilla are always trying to reduce the cross-site tracking attack surface. Safari on iPhone is particularly hard to fingerprint since there are millions of identical iPhones.

So even to the extent that it's possible, RB2B probably isn't putting in all the effort required to track everyone.

Something better:

RB2B works by matching hashed emails. Its script asks three identity-data partners whether they already know your browser, gets back an MD5/SHA-256 hash of your email, and sends that hash plus page details to RB2B. RB2B matches the hash to a person (name, LinkedIn profile, work email). If none of the partners knows you, it falls back to looking up your company from your IP address through Demandbase.

How I checked: rb2b.com runs its own tracking script. I downloaded it from ddwl4m2hdecbv.cloudfront.net/b/1VN080HQL06J/1VN080HQL06J.js.gz, which returns 403 unless you send a rb2b.com Referer. The code was obfuscated, so I decoded it with webcrack. Then I called each partner endpoint and loaded the page in a real Chrome to see what it set.

This explains their numbers. Person-level matching only works where partner cookies were linked to your email on some other site, which mostly means Chrome. Safari and Firefox block those cookies, which fits their 30–40% person-level match rate.

Where is your quote from?

Claude Opus 5.5 xhigh.

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