A database including email addresses and phone numbers of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube users was left exposed on the Web, according to a report. Hong Kong-registered Social Data says it only uses publicly available data, but web scraping is strictly against most social media platforms’ terms of use. — SCMP
A Hong Kong-registered company that sells data on social media influencers has exposed as many as 235 million user profiles scraped from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube on the Web without a password or any other authentication required to access it, according to a report by British research firm Comparitech.
Security researcher Bob Diachenko, who leads Comparitech’s cybersecurity research team, uncovered three identical copies of a database which included names, contact information, images and statistics about followers on Aug 1, Comparitech said in the report on Aug 19.
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