It seems that data leaks have become much more regular in recent times. With big companies facing the issue, it seems like more of this is coming the user’s way. As per the recent information, a social media analytics company known as Social Data has leaked data regarding hundreds of millions of user profiles on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It is one of the biggest data leak issues to come into existence for a long while. The issue was caused due to unsecured and dubious ways of storing the user’s data.
Social Data is known for legally selling social media users data to marketing companies. The company had all the data stored on their servers without any authentication or online protections after which the hackers were simply able to access the data, which was later posted on dark sites. The data had a lot of information like username, First and Last name, account description, who it belongs to, statistics about follower engagement, including a number of followers, engagement rate, follower growth rate, audience gender, audience age, audience location, likes, last post timestamp, age, gender, and some samples included email and phone numbers as well.
The total number of profiles that have been leaked belongs to Instagram (192,392,954), TikTok (42,129,799), and YouTube (3,955,892) totaling close to 235 million. The company has currently made no announcement or revelation about how much and what another type of data has been exposed, but the access to the database has been closed for now.