Do you mean him searching for open-source information about his customers that his customers voluntarily put on the web, or him saying it to us?

If someone spent $30,000 on my digital cards, I'd look him up so that I could sleep at night and not worry that his kids are going hungry because of this.

(I'm not someone who sells these kinds of things, so I'm fully aware this is largely armchair quarterbacking.)

Him using customer provided data to then go and look those people up on the Internet.

Creepy. I can't understand why anyone on HN thinks it's acceptable.

So googling for information about someone that I do business with is creepy? Pretty sure that I don't agree with that.

It depends on the business, but in general I give a supplier my information so that they can supply me with the goods I request; inform me about that process; and invoice me.

Using that information for other reasons without informing me is a clear, unambiguous, invasion of my privacy. It's probably not legal in the UK.

Tl:dr yes, it's creepy. Especially in the context of a game dev.

There are CRM plugins that do it for you automatically when you view records. At the low-end, when I go into Mailchimp, there's a pay plugin (that I don't use) that puts up social information. If anyone emails me, Rapportive brings up their social profile to the right of the email.

Depending on the business I guess it's okay. But for a game dev?