You should not have been downvoted for your opinion on this, but I have to respectfully disagree. There MUST have been somebody at some point who mentioned that they were storing the details of non-users and making a massive database of connections without authorization, and as the CEO he must have been aware of this, and as the CEO he made a bad decision to go ahead and do it anyway.

He didn't even respond that they were checking your address book against their database for matches and then making those connections and dumping the rest of the data. He actually confirmed that they are storing non-user data in the hope of one-day making a connection. But if that was correct, the new user would make that connection when they signed up. You don't need two independent sources to make the connection through the address book.

I'll admit I only really superficially followed this through HN, and it seems you're more informed than I am - but my point was this was handled FAR better than AirBnB's debacle.