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> Only that businesses do things in the business's interest

That's not mutually exclusive with "someone on the sales team uploaded the entire customer list for sales purposes, not realizing the privacy implications".

>more frequently than databreaches.

You're fighting against both hanlon's razor and occam's razor here. The OP states the leak came from Apollo, and as other commenters have noted, Apollo specifically has a "Contributor Network" that shares email lists with other companies, and isn't well documented. It's not hard to imagine how this was done unintentionally. On the other hand there's no evidence to suggest this was done intentionally, other generic cynicism of "businesses do things in the business's interest" or whatever.

And my point is that it's pretty easy for people to accidentally do it, and this is corroborated by the available evidence, so we should apply hanlon's razor rather than assuming someone at browserstack was laughing maniacally while uploading the email list.
Linkedin got users to unwittingly to share their entire contact list by signing into gmail. What makes you think something similar wouldn't happen to some non-technical person on the sales team?

>and selling user data to make a quick buck

Are there actually companies that will pay you $$$ for a list of emails?

>After a brief discussion, the emailer told me they got my details from Apollo.io

The landing page for Apollo.io says it's a "AI sales platform". In other words, a CRM. My guess is that someone on the sales team uploaded the entire customer list for sales purposes, not realizing the privacy implications.

>Courts have been dodging the question

It's not hard to find contradictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge_standoff#Trials_of_...

If by "courts" you mean appellate (precedent setting) courts, cases like these usually never get to that stage because cases like these are straightforward enough that juries can rule on them without lawyers getting into esoteric arguments.

Ruby Ridge standoff - Wikipedia

>Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen.

It's also not hard to think of half a dozen other groups that could possibly benefit and plausibly have enough clout to steer things in their favor, hence why the need to make a specific claim rather than beating around the bush a vague "they" that can't be refuted.

>who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?

It's really not clear, which is why I listed 3 plausible options. I'm also not going to bother attacking an imaginary position and be accused of "strawman" or whatever.

Someone who can't articulate who the villains are out of a pre-selected list and has to fall back to personal attacks is pretty "weak" as well.

>There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this construction is used to infer the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.

This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion. Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking that we're being oppressed by The Elites™.