Is discoverorg.com Safe?

We have been receiving a ton of spam lately, to deactivated email addresses, and quite a lot of them mention "This email was sent to <redacted>, we received your contact information from various tradeshows and 3rd party databases like DiscoverOrg and Leadspace". Interestingly, the email addresses receiving this email were never published publicly, can not be found online with a Google search, and are for support client use only. Yet DiscoverOrg is selling these email lists to customers as valid, and letting their customers get hit with spamming complaints. There are also several complaints about DiscoverOrg on the BBB, most with responses from DiscoverOrg saying that "they're under no legal obligation to remove the person's email address", and claiming that they were already publicly on the Internet, which was countered in several cases.

I got a warning from WOT when checking out this company for potential use by my sales reps and while some WOTusers may not agree with my opinion that businesses are not individuals and don't have the same privacy rights, it's not true that this is a questionable site that is "just" a spammer. It exposes org charts on businesses to sales and marketing departments so I do agree there is some privacy risk for the individuals at those organizations who would prefer their employee base and organization structure be treated as confidential, there's really little to no privacy risk to the users of the site, in my opinion.

They are a fantastic tool for Sales and Marketing people in the IT industry to gather intelligence on companies' IT departments and IT layout. Information you can find when you subscribe to DiscoverOrg are phone numbers, email address, current installed technologies,Org Charts, upcoming IT projects, and basic company metrics. All the info is gathered by their in-house research team, so actual people verify the information which translates to high accuracy.