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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

This is all scrapped public social media data. No credentials or govt information. It's very easy to download or buy this data legally.

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It appears to also contain information possibly acquired from other companies. For example, the author notes that he had attributed to him a phone number he had assigned to him by AT&T that he never used or shared.

Yeah, I'm wondering if this is all scrapped public data or a breach of some kind. Are land line phone numbers published in a directory (like a phone book) in USA?

Guarantee the fine print in the AT&T contract authorized them to share information with a third party.

Back in the day (maybe it is still this way) your landline was default "listed" and you had to pay a monthly fee to be an unlisted number. So AT&T most likely listed his number in some kind of phone book / directory.

Yeah. Email addresses? Phone numbers? All of that is practically public at this point anyway. This article is crying wolf. Someday there is going to be a massive credential compromise.

are you sure? how did you come to that conclusion. thanks for the info though, very glad to hear it.

Look at the personal record that was in the article. It looks like aggregated public information. And look at what the companies referenced in the DB do.

It's possible there's someone selling them so not-quite-public info, too, but it's probably more like phone numbers and less like private messaged on Facebook or Linkedin.

The title reads like data from 1.2B profiles was leaked by Facebook and Linkedin, but this looks like scraping public profiles from them.

Yes, there are dozens of these data enrichment companies. They scrape public sites and use browser extensions, SaaS tools, inbox addons, etc. They mix it together into profiles, and pretty much have the same dataset by now.

Clearbit is one of them and even a YC company.

Yep! And as someone who has worked with these data sets and worked on the scraping tools on services like LinkedIn, a lot of the data is outdated, incorrect, or mixing together different entities with the same name into one person or splitting the same person into separate entities incorrectly.

I mean, this is literally just a leak of data that People Data Labs is selling to anyone who signs up to their service. The 'leak' is just bypassing their payment requirements, so by definition all the data leaked is available for purchase.

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