Please stop thinking about laws, and think about enforcement. If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. We have all sorts of fancy laws on the books that aren't enforced. Environmental regs, animal welfare regs, anti trust laws, white collar anti fraud laws. Data laws fall into this bucket. Nobody that would actually enforce those laws gives a dam. We won't be able to solve any of our problems with new laws, until we can actually enforce the laws already on the books

I believe it actually is illegal, via a set of more general rules on data collection, on what constitutes a fraud, etc. May not be spelled out exactly like this specific use case, but still very likely covered by law. Just difficult to prove.

I think there’s a good chunk of the SF tech event scene built around pulling in qualified email addresses, too. “Apply to attend”

Its straight up wire fraud.

I swear to god a couple of the interviews I have been in lately have felt more like free consultations rather than me applying for a job.

It's technically fraud, but there aren't any damages.

Because some animals are more equal than others and the government has decided that companies are not only citizens but the more equal group.

Half the shit companies do that gets them a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.

It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio

America has no data protection law, apart from some hyper-specific ones: healthcare, video rental records. That makes all of this data sharing completely legal. As well as that, it is widely agreed there that lying is free speech.

It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)