"While we're still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies," a LinkedIn spokesperson told Insider in a statement.

Although the information was public, this data combined with other data may still give valuable insights for certain uses in the gray/white area. I can think of background checks for job applications, insurance applications etc. If you apply for a job with a shiny LinkedIn page, but some other parts of the aggregated data are about things you rather don't like them to know, they might prefer an other candidate. Without telling you of course.