> consensus is that you can steal intellectual property

There isn't even consensus around the legitimacy of the notion of intellectual property (I'm happy to represent the position that it is not legitimate), let alone the notion that it's proper to use the same word that we use for larceny of physical objects to describe copying it.

In any case, this isn't an intellectual property issue, but a privacy issue. The question is whether this data was properly being kept private, or whether it belongs in the public domain in the first place. There doesn't appear to have been any announcement of what data was accessed, so it doesn't seem to be something we can know at this time.