Even if they don’t release the data publicly, they’ll likely continue selling it on the black market even if they get the ransom payment. You really can’t expect criminals to be truthful if they have a chance to make even more money.

Never pay a ransom. The entire reason ransomware works is because people/companies pay the ransom. If nobody paid the ransom, ransomware wouldn’t be anywhere near as common as it is now.

It’s the same thing with scalpers of event tickets, GPUs, etc. If people stopped buying scalped stuff, the scalpers wouldn’t have a market and there’d be far fewer of them.