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I agree - this is a sword that can cut any way the wielder chooses. It’s part of the reason that Net privacy and tracking issues are so important. Makes you wonder about the uses any large organization can put this technology - credit bureaus for instance.

I’d never heard of this site before this post. How popular and well-known is it? Its impact will only be as great as the number of “eyeballs” it can verify coming to it. Remember that every click we give it drives up its ability to sell ads, and keeps it going.
Orwell’s Big Brother has a place - it’s about 1/2 inch wide, on my bookshelf. Or perhaps in the imagination, of things to avoid.

"I'd never heard of this site before this post. How popular and well-known is it? Its impact will only be as great as the number of "eyeballs" it can verify coming to it."

They're new and don't have much traction yet. They supply services to other organizations - possibly governmental agencies. They don't directly take advantage of ad revenue yet and their "listener" technology is functional, but under utilized - still in need of maturity. They've got some talented and famous thought leadership associated with the company. There are a few other companies who provide similar capabilities.

I'm quite intimate with credit bureau capabilities. Besides the deep financial transactional data they have on everyone - anyone that's ever filled out a warranty or rebate card, subscribed to a magazine, had utilities in their name, rented an apartment or owned a home, held a job, etc. - is in their databases. This data can be correlated to health records, court filings, phone and internet access, public records, and other census / demographic data to produce a very complete profile and highly predictable model of preferences / behaviors. It's Orwelian scary, but very useful for business purposes.

I don't personally know anyone who is "off the grid" (no electronic records), so these databases are immense - deep and wide - sometimes carrying 2,000 attributes of data (names, aliases, addresses, products, prices, dates) and hundreds of lines (transactions over time - phone numbers and vendors, employers / position / salary / dates, etc.).