&gt; What it looks like is that a recruiter has paid a third party service to retrieve my CV it scraped from Monster in 2014 and get my contact details. Contact details that shouldn&#x27;t exist in the open.<p>In 2014 your profile was public, so your contact information <i>did</i> exist in the open.  May not be legal for a company to crawl Monster to store information though, you would have to look at Monster&#x27;s terms of service (for example LinkedIn doesn&#x27;t allow apps to store LinkedIn data, only to retrieve them via the API).<p>&gt;I understand that placing my personal details on a job board would have resulted in everyone and their mother being able to read and save it, but I didn&#x27;t really think that my CV and personal contact details would have been archived and continued to be used by recruiters long after I disabled my account.<p>Everything you put on the Internet is available to everybody until the end of times.  Internalize that and you&#x27;ll be fine :)<p>&gt; I disabled my account as an indication that I was no longer looking for work, contacting me in this way is fairly blatantly ignoring this preference.<p>Recruiters don&#x27;t give a damn about your preferences.  Just blacklist this guy.