According to researchers, the trove of data was left for public access without any security authentication.
While we do as much as we can to protect our personal information, more often than not, a lot of it is still out in the open thanks to social media networks. This has led many agencies and individuals in the past to scrape this information in bulk using it for marketing purposes despite the fact that it is illegal.
See: Database with millions of Instagram influencers’ info leaked online
One such agency is Social Data which offers access to the data of influencers to marketers. However, things went wrong recently when Bob Diachenko from Comparitech found a database of the company exposed on August 1st containing 235 million user profiles from different social networks composed of the following:
Instagram – total 192,392,954 records from 2 datasets
TikTok – 42,129,799 records
YouTube – 3,955,892 records
Here’s how the data looked like for the public:
Screenshot from the leaked data (Credit: Comparitech)
The origination of the data points at another non-functioning company named Deep Social which allegedly has no link with Social Data but nonetheless has been notorious for illegal data scraping in the past.
The data exposed includes usernames, full names, contact information, images, follower statistics, age, gender, and a few more details – most of which is publicly available but nonetheless it is important to remember that despite that, a ..
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