Just throw in only a date of birth and you have only all you need for identity theft.

Besides, email is usually enough to cross reverence with other benign data troves. But there is no way any reseller could possibly profit from that.

Really no reason to be overly paranoid about.

> Name and Email

Yes, both are PII, which is highly regulated in EU and CA (among others I'm sure). If these knowingly "leaked" in a data breach, the company which leaked them would be legally obligated to notify me. Sounds pretty serious to me.

But it's a similar concept. If someone accidentally gives some website their name + email, they could be part of a leak for some service they don't even use. People probably care less about Tea in particular because they've never heard about it before the data leaks.

"So-and-so used Tea" is clearly not the focus of the coverage of the Tea app leak. Again, let's be explicit about impacts here. You can deploy hyperbole and hypothesis to make anyone a horrifying villain. But if you do that at least be honest about it.

Edit to note: the Tea story has now fallen off the front page while this one is still going strong.

> You can deploy hyperbole and hypothesis to make anyone a horrifying villain.

Alternatively you can deploy a dismissive attitude and subtle ridicule to make any concern sound silly, no matter how important the issue is to people for a variety of different reasons which you don't seem to be receptive to understanding.

And that sort of infighting is certainly many orders of magnitude more fashionable, both on social media and in real life, than people being observant and critical of companies and governments when they find new ways of eroding our rights and freedoms a little bit more than they already have.

I sympathize with ~everyone affected by any type of data leak, but I'm only human with limited time and attention. That means I can't actively engage with every single issue that plagues our world, both out of practical, as well as sanity-maintaining reasons.

Implying that we're hypocrites if we don't engage with completely unrelated issues before we engage with issues that directly affect us is probably the clearest example of a bad faith argument I've read on this site in a very long time.

I guess it's more about the chats there, but swap Tea with Ashley Madison or something. Having your name+email on that leak could be quite bad.

The only one arguing in bad faith here is clearly you.

First, you say that a full name or email is somehow not a big deal, even though these are some of the most critical pieces of PII, either one would obviously be enough to unmask exactly who the person is.

And now, because there is some random HN post about a hack that affects a significantly smaller user base than Google's and Chrome's invasive practices and it doesn't have as many upvotes that somehow means this topic isn't serious and that everyone is arguing in bad faith.

You either have absolutely no understanding of PII or privacy, and I seriously hope you never work on anything related to it. Or you're just arguing in bad faith, I’m not sure which is worse, to be honest.

> inarguably much more impactful a privacy issue

Except, you know, the volume of users impacted.

Tea had a few tens of thousands of users. Google has billions.

Yea, the use case is not wanting to be signed up for another stupid “newsletter” I never asked for that’s full of crap I don’t want.

> most of them are at least slightly criminal

Huh ? Not wanting reddit to know my government name makes me a suspect ?

Having a 'government name' and calling it that makes you suspicious alone.