Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This paper presents an empirical study of the lead marketing ecosystem, tracing data flows from collection to consumer contact using a measurement framework that instruments lead-generation websites and monitors controlled phone numbers and email addresses. The study reveals extensive sharing of sensitive health information with numerous third parties, deceptive brokerage practices involving data augmentation, and aggressive telemarketing tactics including neighbor spoofing. Analysis of consumer complaints corroborates these findings, highlighting the non-compliant nature of the ecosystem.
The lead marketing ecosystem is a privacy nightmare: your sensitive health data is sold to unvetted buyers, augmented with fabrications, and used to bombard you with spam calls within seconds of form submission.
The lead marketing ecosystem enables collection, sale, and use of personal data submitted via web forms to deliver personalized quotes in high-value verticals such as insurance. Despite its scale and sensitivity of the collected data, this ecosystem remains largely unexplored by the research community. We present the first empirical study of privacy and spam risks in lead marketing, developing an end-to-end measurement framework to trace data flows from data collection to consumer contact. Our setup instruments over 100 health-related lead-generation websites and monitors 200 controlled phone numbers and email addresses to understand downstream marketing practices. We observe sharing of highly personal and sensitive health information to more than 70 distinct third parties on these lead generation websites. By purchasing our own and other organic leads from three major lead platforms, we uncover deceptive brokerage practices, where consumer data is sold to unvetted buyers and often augmented or fabricated with attributes such as health status and weight. We received a total of over 8,000 telemarketing phone calls, 600 text messages, and 200 emails, where calls often began within seconds of form submission. Many campaigns relied on VoIP-based neighbor spoofing and high-frequency dialing, at times rendering phones unusable. Our experiments with phone and email opt-outs suggest phone-based opt-outs to help the most, although all were ineffective at completely stopping marketing communications. Analysis of 7,432 Better Business Bureau (BBB) complaints and reviews corroborates these findings from the consumer perspective. Overall, our results reveal a highly interconnected and non-compliant lead marketing ecosystem that aggressively monetizes sensitive consumer data.
Stanford HAI