The guy "taking over" freenode is Andrew Lee. He's been a sponser of freenode since 2013. He's also been an admin and had access to any data held by freenode since he purchased Freenode Ltd in 2017. He's also the founder and owner of Private Internet Access VPN service, so he really wouldn't need to use freenode if he wanted to gather data from people.
Here's his statement on the matter FWIW: <https://freenode.net/news/freenode-is-foss>
