Instagram, the giant photo and video sharing platform owned by Facebook suffered another privacy mishap as contact details of millions of influencers, celebrities and brands got scraped and exposed in a massive database that was found online.
The non-password protected database hosted by Amazon Web Services had more than 49 million records that contained public data scrapped from Instagram and included profile pictures, biography, follower numbers plus contact details such as phone numbers and emails. The worth of the accounts was included too depending on shares, likes, reach, engagement and follower count as a metric for paying said influencers which include prominent brands and celebrities.
Social media marketing firm, Chtrbx initially uploaded the database as backtracked by security researcher Anurag Sen but the database included personal info from influencers who have never worked with the firm. They have since taken the database offline after Techcrunch reported on it.
Facebook said is investigating this issue. Looks like their shift to privacy isn’t working so well.
