They could be injecting their own ads or affiliate links into the content.

For example, if a post links to Amazon.

I have not looked at the source code.

The story hypes this to be a bit more than this is.

Framework sent a laptop to the lead Mint dev. He’s going to try make sure it works well with Mint, but it already does.

The more low key framing straight on the Mint blog is here:

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4762

They cannot see phone numbers of contacts, no.

They already are.