[gruez]

>After a brief discussion, the emailer told me they got my details from Apollo.io

The landing page for Apollo.io says it's a "AI sales platform". In other words, a CRM. My guess is that someone on the sales team uploaded the entire customer list for sales purposes, not realizing the privacy implications.

[michaelcampbell]

> not realizing the privacy implications.

If only.

[gruez]

Linkedin got users to unwittingly to share their entire contact list by signing into gmail. What makes you think something similar wouldn't happen to some non-technical person on the sales team?

[michaelcampbell]

My point is I don't think one bit of this is accidental.

[gruez]

And my point is that it's pretty easy for people to accidentally do it, and this is corroborated by the available evidence, so we should apply hanlon's razor rather than assuming someone at browserstack was laughing maniacally while uploading the email list.

[michaelcampbell]

I made no such assertion. Only that businesses do things in the business's interest more frequently than databreaches.

[gruez]

> Only that businesses do things in the business's interest

That's not mutually exclusive with "someone on the sales team uploaded the entire customer list for sales purposes, not realizing the privacy implications".

>more frequently than databreaches.

You're fighting against both hanlon's razor and occam's razor here. The OP states the leak came from Apollo, and as other commenters have noted, Apollo specifically has a "Contributor Network" that shares email lists with other companies, and isn't well documented. It's not hard to imagine how this was done unintentionally. On the other hand there's no evidence to suggest this was done intentionally, other generic cynicism of "businesses do things in the business's interest" or whatever.

[luckylion]

Hanlon's razor suggests that browserstack has made the conscious decision to use a vendor and share data with them. Companies of that size don't YOLO those things, that relationship and the data-sharing has passed through legal, they have a contract in place.

Don't assume businesses operate the same way some job-hunting person on monday morning is.

[zelphirkalt]

Working in sales but not being able to handle customer data responsibly (for whatever reason). Not a good look.

[senordevnyc]

You say this like it’s unusual. In my experience, sales is incentivized to only really care about closing deals. Everything else is often just a speed bump to them.