If they are gathering data through any means it's no different than other marketing firms. I think the real debate needs to be about what any companies can share.

But it is not about what they can share, it is about what they or anyone can collect, store and use.

What you can share lets companies store and make decisions based on data they shouldn't have and couldn't share as long as their inputs and outputs look clean.

I,e. Facebook or Google could help you intentionally run a race biased campaign across all their assets as long as they don't tell you any specifics and include a little noise so you can't be sure of any one user's race. All thanks to what they can collect, use, but refuse to share.

This is a losing battle. The cost of rebuilding this kind of database, even from scratch, is only going to go down.

Why do you think any of this data is private?

They seem like they were doing reddit scraping/Facebook scraping.

Nothing illegal about that.

It's public information. The only difference is it's all in one place.

No special rights are needed - the kind of data that is described in the article may be difficult and/or expensive to get, but it's not illegal to get, not illegal to have, and not illegal to distribute to others. It would be legal for you to do the same - maybe it shouldn't be legal (and it isn't so in e.g EU), but it currently is in USA.

If the leak would've been published willingly by Deep Root Analytics, there would be no crime (according to current USA privacy rules) here at all, no currently valid reason to jail anyone.

Doesn't it have religious pref, ethnicity and much more?