> A lot of people mocking the author or others for being scared and worried are basically blaming the victim here, and I would like them to stop.
I don't think this is mocking (excluding the few obligatory spammers). It's a known fact that if you have a public e-mail, you will receive a lot of spam and threats. Also, an actual request could've very well taken a similar form - would you have been okay with this if they actually requested their data?
I'm not saying these actions were great. Sending out these mails was definitely not the nice thing to do. And yes, the threat of a lawsuit can be very scary. But, unfortunately, this is something you must be able to handle as a webmaster. It's also not great or nice that people try to log into my ssh server all the time, but this is just something you get when you have an ssh server on the internet. Same thing.
I don't think this is mocking (excluding the few obligatory spammers). It's a known fact that if you have a public e-mail, you will receive a lot of spam and threats. Also, an actual request could've very well taken a similar form - would you have been okay with this if they actually requested their data?
I'm not saying these actions were great. Sending out these mails was definitely not the nice thing to do. And yes, the threat of a lawsuit can be very scary. But, unfortunately, this is something you must be able to handle as a webmaster. It's also not great or nice that people try to log into my ssh server all the time, but this is just something you get when you have an ssh server on the internet. Same thing.