I've always been a little confused how this works. If I got all that info for free, it's a "data leak", but if I pay to get the same detailed personal information it's...
In either case my personal data is given away without my consent, but there's this implication that it's only an issue when someone doesn't pay for it.
You're right, my take on this is that a company scraped a bunch of publicly available information, that people left open (consciously or not.) That's why only a subset have phone numbers. The profile URLs, emails, most people don't even try to protect those.
Normally the company sells this data, but now they've given it away. It's not good this data got out because the curation has some value to spammers or whoever. But using the word "leak" here undermines the severity of a real leak where passwords and social security numbers are exposed. Data that was never meant by anyone to be open.
Everyone likely has (technically) provided consent for every piece of information here being shared with partners. Buried in fine print that it wasn't really expected they'd read, of course. It's the cost of being online, and that sucks, but it seems only a leak of what had already been given out.
If you get drivers info by hacking a DMV database, it's prison. If you got the same details by paying a few millions for FOIA requests, you're a good citizen and a model tax payer.
Jokes aside, can you really file FOIA requests to get personal driver details from DMV? I thought FOIA would only apply for stuff that is meant to be public, but isn't due to difficulties of hosting, putting it up, etc.
Mind you, I didn't research the topic of what can or cannot be requested with FOIA, so I might be totally wrong.
In either case my personal data is given away without my consent, but there's this implication that it's only an issue when someone doesn't pay for it.