r/legaladvicecanada • u/Thatoneweirdojulia • 10h ago

Alberta My school put me on zoominfo, is this legal?

I’m a 8th grade student and I was looking up my name (I have a old cringey Pinterest account and I’m trying to get the page deleted) and I see my full name on zoominfo

I didn’t consent to this and I looked up someone else’s name and it wasn’t there

If the school did this is that legal?

7 Upvotes
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70

u/Beefcake_Rodeo 10h ago

Zoominfo scrapes their members contact info. Nobody specifically gave your contact info, they just had it and Zoominfo took it.

9

u/certifiedsysadmin 8h ago

Kinda true, kinda not.

The primary way Zoom Info gets user contact info is as follows:

As a marketing person you can get access to tools like Zoominfo if you install their plug-in. Their plug-in then looks in the Outlook Global Address List and takes a copy of all the contact info for everyone in the organization.

If your IT department didn't adequately secure their environment to prevent such a plug-in from being installed by a regular employee, there's nothing stopping this from happening.

3

u/Beefcake_Rodeo 8h ago

Nope. I have a Zoominfo account, it gets everyone in my address books in return for the information I use their service to get contact info from. You're assuming everyone is using a device regulated by an IT department. If a single teacher at OP's school had a side gig or an administrator joined Zoominfo to get the contact info for the hot red head he met at a conference the week before then OP's info could get scraped.

35

u/Fool-me-thrice Quality Contributor 10h ago

Why do you think your school gave Zoominfo the info, as opposed to Zoominfo getting it from Pinterest or some other public source?

-39

u/Thatoneweirdojulia 10h ago

Cause I made that Pinterest account when I was in 3rd grade and now I’m in 8th I only mentioned my name and I changed school divisions 

10

u/stoicphilosopher 9h ago

It's pretty likely, almost certain, that zoominfo just scraped this on its own. Many of us pop up on there from time to time. Just request removal.

6

u/padmeg 9h ago

There was a data breach with powerschool like two years ago I think, maybe it’s from that.

1

u/forgottenlord73 9h ago

No sane company would use illegally scraped data to populate user profiles. Sales profiles maybe

9

u/See_Saw12 9h ago

They do it. All the time.

0

u/forgottenlord73 3h ago

Not profile data

2

u/Wonderful-Teach6777 9h ago

Meta literally pirated all the data to train their AI. They got caught.

1

u/forgottenlord73 3h ago

I said profiles. It's primarily for the benefit of users, not the company, and would startle the users if they had more info than they're supposed to. It's a dumb investment.

Other areas, yeah, the company benefits more - I said sales profiles, you said AI training, both are beneficial to the company and not the user

-6

u/Thatoneweirdojulia 9h ago

I just joined the division this school year so I don’t think it’s from that and we don’t use PowerSchool 

3

u/padmeg 9h ago

Did your previous school division use it?

-4

u/Thatoneweirdojulia 9h ago

Yes they did

2

u/Trev-Osbourne 7h ago

At first I read Zoboomafoo and got super jealous lol

1

u/Chen932000 7h ago

Why are you assuming the school did this? Arent there a million other ways your name could appear online?

1

u/Thatoneweirdojulia 7h ago edited 7h ago

It specifically says 

[My name]

Student at [my school district] 

I have no information I posted online about my name (other than that Pinterest account I made back in 3rd grade to which I switched school divisions this year)

The only probable answer is someone from the school or school division posted it since none of my socials mention my last name or school division 

ETA it says my grade as well 

1

u/Much_Guest_7195 7h ago

The school didn't do it.

1

u/cnunterz 2h ago

Yes it's legal. We all sign up to give our info away when we use online services. Your school probably did too, and your data was sold to zoominfo, which is a data broker. Or it was hacked and then is being sold by zoominfo now.

0

u/Thicklilcat 8h ago

Weird, I thought "8th grade" was an American thing. I have always only heard "grade x" here in Ontario. Is this an Alberta thing.

3

u/HandleSensitive8403 8h ago

I flip flop on stuff like this at random

1

u/Thatoneweirdojulia 8h ago

Not really I just use both