Who knows how much additional data certain people has on forum users, probably a decent amount, and probably enough to make a lot of people uncomfortable if they knew exactly what was being collected on them by third parties, even if the information is public.
I am sure if it continues this way one day it would be out of theymos hand's to control the amount of misuse of this data, as it is already been violating the main reason behind the implementations of some systems like trust list for example, mostly it begin as being something very private for users to make there
own judgement but making it public just induced more drama. Even merit sources which were to be hidden for not being bitched for merits are now easily accessible to anyone who wants to hunt some.
If the this type of excessive scraping would not be curbed or handled now, than it would already be too late.
For merit sources there isn't anything more easy then ignore merit beggars and if some do, then they just get some negative trust as being merit beggars ....
So most people will not be merit begging cause they no nothing good will come from it.