Data of 235 million Instagram, YouTube, Tiktok users exposed in a data breach

Pal Chheda

August 18, 2020

A British research firm, Comparitech, disclosed how an unsecured database left nearly 235 million Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube profiles exposed online. A vast majority of these profiles were scraped from Instagram with data from under 100 million profiles, while at least 42 million records from TikTok and nearly 4 million from YouTube which contained personal information of people including their usernames, profile pictures, number of followers, likes, age, and gender. According to researchers, this data originated from a company called Deep Social, which was banned by Facebook in 2018. Comparitech reached out to Deep Social to fix their security loophole, assuming the data belonged to them. Then the latter forwarded the disclosure to Social Data, a social media influencer data-marketing company. Social Data later shut the unsecured database after it was reported to them. However, Social Data has denied any connection with Deep Social, according to the Comparitech report. It is still unclear if Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube will take any strict action against Social Data for this event and scale-up security to protect their users’ privacy and personal data.

Abridged fromForbes