Data of 235 million Instagram, TikTok and YouTube users exposed

Due to the dubious storage methods, a social media analytics company has exposed hundreds of million user profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Apparently, Social Data, a company known for legally selling influential social media users’ data to marketing companies, did not even incorporate password protection nor set-up any authentication process to access the database. Some hackers got their hands on this data and dumped it in dark websites.

The data dump contained personal information of the people and user-engagement metrics including username, officially registered name, account description, whether the profile belongs to a business or has advertisements, statistics about follower engagement, including: 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.