> People regularly get calls saying they are in violation of tax law and must pay. This is an interesting point you bring up, which merits diving into a bit fu

> People regularly get calls saying they are in violation of tax law and must pay. This is an interesting point you bring up, which merits diving into a bit further. I think it's precisely because CCPA is so new that this experiment is more unethical than if they were just calling up people saying "you owe money to the IRS, send me gift cards". The IRS spends a ton of money every year telling people that these calls are scams; but Christine or the operator of freeradical.zone likely had no such public service announcements from the State of California. On the other hand, they probably did hear news items about this new data privacy law that California passed, and thought the emails were from actual individuals.