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Discussion on: Please ELI5 big data and privacy concerns, and possible black hacks

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Kevin Woblick

Well, anybody who has at least a few dollars in his pockets is a worthy target. And almost all data is usable in some shady way, even if it's just your email address for spam.

People buying your personal data probably do this in bulk with thousands or millions of other datasets. They try to some automated credit card fraud or whatever they can do with your data. If it's working, they got something you paid for, if not they try the next dataset. And if there's no valuable data in there, they probably bought your email address which can be used to send spam.