Not a breach. Was scraped data. Scraping is legal. Scraping is simply writing code to look at the data one by one and gather it all in a database. They apparently used the api to do it. An api is a public direct interface with the database that is specifically made for computer code written by other to scan the data. Most websites offer apis. In fact a court ruling ..ironically involving LinkedIn .....said not only is scraping legal since its data publicly available on the website and that website can't try to prevent scraping. This means linkedins terms of service would be unenforcable and maybe illegal. The court ruling https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping-and-technically-prohibited-it/ If you give your data to a publicly viewable website you are giving away your data. It becomes public information. Anyone can do what they want with it including sell it. Apparently the only reason this attracted attention was it gathered a lot of the database and they offered it for sale in a shady place. Anyone could have offered it for sale upfront and obviously on Alibaba or any legit place as the prior company in the previous court ruling lawsuit was doing.