As somebody who's listed products on the AWS marketplace, when you "subscribe" to a product you give them your information as due course. This is obvious, spelled out, and known across all the marketplaces. So I'll assume the part you take issue is, is with reaching out to the individual on LinkedIn instead of through Azure. I don't understand how in a world where companies cold call you after buying your phone number, and spam you with emails after you try to unsubscribe, suddenly messaging you on LinkedIn is over the line.
It's strange, and I'm glad they're moving away from the practice, but to pretend it's this big privacy fiasco is disingenuous at best. They (Canonical) still have all your data, they're just being more subtle about it now. How is that better?
3a spells out what you're agreeing to share with the publisher of the product in the marketplace when you subscribe to it.
Additionally the listings each link to their respective privacy policy right underneath the subscribe button, plainly in view above the fold.
Finally, I've just attempted to subscribe to "Ubuntu Server" in the Azure Marketplace to see what it looks like, and it shows you a form with the information it's going to share with Ubuntu on the screen for you to modify before subscribing! So it seems like you arguing this isn't "obvious" is in bad faith, because it's obvious for any reasonable person who's actually used the marketplace.
I'm not endorsing more ad spam, but I'm really caught off guard that using a service with a real name/email and getting added to a CRM is generating this level of indignation.
Do none of you guys work in corporate? I get Linkedin/email/phone spam all the time. This isn't new. The only interesting thing here is that the trigger and the response time were so short.
Again, I'm not advocating for more of this or even saying I like it. I'm just saying "why are we all of a sudden upset about this?"