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Comment by greyfox | Hacker News Reader

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

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who has worked with these data sets and worked on the scraping tools on services like LinkedIn, a lot of the data is outdated, incorrect, or mixing together different entities with the same name into one person or splitting the same person into separate entities incorrectly.

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.

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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