And what is the reason people want their own information to be publicly accessible you think?

My public information on LinkedIn is public - to market myself. I didn't make it public so that another company could store it in their own databases, analyse it and sell it to "my boss".

This is a discussion touched upon in the article "What were the public squares and private rooms of the web? Who got to determine access? Should data be protected as speech?"

Anyway, as mentioned in another comment, the highly unethical work HiQ is doing will be hard to capitalize on with the GDPR coming up.

Where in that did I give permission to HiQ to do this highly unethical thing?

When you explicitly chose to broadcast that information to the public via LinkedIn who explicitly makes that information available to the general public and does not require you to log in (in contrast to say Facebook)

> highly unethical

How is a company leveraging intentionally public data unethical? That's quite a stretch. Stop making your information public if you don't want people or companies to look at it. It's as simple as that.

If you want to talk about unethical practices, let's talk about financial companies selling your transaction data to advertisers and insurance agencies, or social networking platforms re-purposing the content of your direct messages, or ISPs selling your browsing history. Those are actual things which have a reasonable expectation of privacy. These are actual instances of problematic PII abuse and what laws like GDPR are intending to curb.