alt Hacker Newsyou are close to a system in a way that those guardrails are clear and present; the story is from the point of view of a victim, and it is possible that they were indeed a victim. Therefore the means of the stalking is not known at all via this story, but somehow, something did occur. It is not surprising on either side, and they do not necessarily contradict each other IMHO
I'm specifically talking about the technical aspect. Even with non-existent separation of concerns, and abysmal practices related to data governance which would be breaking the law in most of the developed world, the story sounds like bullshit. Extracting points of interest and reconstructing paths from raw network telemetry isn't trivial.
The likelihood a random employee could run a quick SQL join to stalk someone based on their name is zero.