One afternoon, I came up with an idea for linking Twitter and Instagram profiles together and making that part of our data offering. It was ethically a little iffy, as it wasn’t data that anyone had exactly consented to give us, but still, the data was already out there, just itching to be used. (In those pre-Cambridge Analytica days, user privacy wasn’t really a big concern in our sector.) After a week of frenzied prototyping, I hit the jackpot: we could link people by looking at their friends. Once I got that up and running, the number of links we could identify exploded, and all the charts
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