It turned out that the data sales company released the user information of 235 million people of InstagramTikTokYouTube without permission

A company that provides influencer information to marketers can access a database containing personal information such as the names and contacts of users of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, totaling 235 million people It turned out that it was published in. It seems that the data was originally obtained by

Data scraping firm leaks 235m Instagram, TikTok, YouTube user records
https://www.hackread.com/data-scraping-firm-leaks-instagram-tiktok-youtube-records/

235 Million Instagram, TikTok And YouTube User Profiles Exposed In Massive Data Leak
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/08/19/massive-data-leak235-million-instagram-tiktok-and-youtube-user-profiles-exposed/

According to IT-related information site Comparitech, a company called Social Data that sells information about influencers of social media to marketers can see a database containing personal information of users of each platform without authentication such as password It was published in.

The breakdown of the database that was released was about 96 million cases on Instagram and about 95 million cases, about 42 million cases on TikTok, about 3.9 million cases on YouTube, a total of about 235 million cases.

The information included was profile name, name, profile picture, account description, stats as influencer (number of followers, engagement rate, follower growth rate, audience gender, target age, likes, etc.), last posted date. , Age, gender. According to a survey by Comparitech, about one-fifth of the data contained a telephone number or email address.

Most of this data seems to have been obtained from the data set name, Deep Social, which was active until 2018, through web scraping using the marketing API. Facebook and Instagram banned the marketing API in 2018 and warned that if it continues to collect data, it will take legal action. In response to this, Deep Social stopped acquiring data and stopped the service.

On the other hand, Social Data is a service that appeared around August 2019. In response to an inquiry by Bob Diachenko, who heads the cyber security research team at Comparitech, a Social Data spokesman denied the relationship with Deep Social and obtained public information from publicly available profiles. Insisted. However, after being contacted regarding this matter, the CTO of Social Data recognized the danger and the server hosting the database was shut down.