I tried googling, it definitely wasn't as easy as you made it seem.
The closest thing I could find for the registering without verification claim was a Verge article [1] about people's Fortnite account being taken over after clicking a link that was sent to them. If you have a better source please do share.
EDIT: Source has been found, apparently store didn't initially send a verification email so anyone could use any email[4], this has been fixed though. I could find no source for the claim that this affected millions or thousands of people.
As for the claim that they were "scanning your pc for everything", that is just completely wrong. According a few articles [2][3] they were reading your steam friends list after getting permission from the user.
And the following miriad of people showing that Epic is getting much more info than it says they do, even before asking permission (including even steam's games play time)
(it was the top post for me searching 'epic games store scan entire pc' btw)
Regarding the email thing, I said thousands (maybe millions) as I have no clue of the number, but remember easily over 300 comments in a'me too' kind of way on reddit when this happened.
> The current implementation is a remnant left over from our rush to implement social features in the early days of Fortnite. It's actually my fault for pushing the launcher team to support it super quickly and then identifying that we had to change it. Since this issue came to the forefront we're going to fix it.
And the following miriad of people showing that Epic is getting much more info than it says they do, even before asking permission (including even steam's games play time)
(it was the top post for me searching 'epic games store scan entire pc' btw)
Regarding the email thing, I said thousands (maybe millions) as I have no clue of the number, but remember easily over 300 comments in a'me too' kind of way on reddit when this happened.
Edit: even Tim admitted they fucked up after being found: https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...
> The current implementation is a remnant left over from our rush to implement social features in the early days of Fortnite. It's actually my fault for pushing the launcher team to support it super quickly and then identifying that we had to change it. Since this issue came to the forefront we're going to fix it.