It seems a little unusual to question the merits of data protection law on the basis that sometimes people can circumvent it by committing crimes!<p>Do you not realise how low response rates to ads and promotional mailshots are? Try as you may, you cannot possibly hope to obtain anything more than a tiny fraction of the data held by a third party by advertising your phishing page on their network, even if the third party actively supports your goals. And even if you get some useful personal information, if you publish it without consent, you&#x27;ve committed a crime.<p>Banning the sharing&#x2F;selling of data without consent imposes <i>significant</i> obstacles to legal and illegal hassling of people whose data has been mined.