Data Firm Exposes 235 Million Social Media Profiles

guest · Aug 19, 2020

Data Firm Exposes 235 Million Social Media Profiles
August 19, 2020
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/data-firm-exposes-235m-social/

A social media data broker has exposed the public-facing profiles of 235 million users via a misconfigured online database, according to researchers.

Comparitech teamed up with Bob Diachenko to uncover three identical copies of the data on August 1, left online with no password or other authentication required to access it.
In total, 192 million profiles were scraped from Instagram, 42 million from TikTok and four million from YouTube.

Although the personal information contained in this trove was all publicly available, social media companies like Facebook have threatened legal action in the past against automated data scraping firms that subsequently sell their collections to marketers.
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Comparitech said that although access to the exposed database was shut down three hours after its first disclosure, it’s unclear how long the information was left online without a password.
The data itself was traced back to Social Data, a firm that apparently sells data on social media influencers to marketers.
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Comparitech: Social media data broker exposes nearly 235 million profiles scraped from Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube

Social Data says it only takes public data from public profiles, but scraping is strictly against most social networks' terms of use
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