Social Data exposes information from millions of social media profiles

Social Data, a company dedicated to the commercialization of data on influential profiles in social networks to marketers, has exposed a database of almost 235 million profiles of social networks on the Internet, without any type of authentication mechanism to access to it.

Bob Diachenko, who heads Comparitech's cybersecurity research team, discovered three identical copies of the exposed data, with information obtained from publicly visible profiles on Youtube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, including data on full name, profile picture, description account, age, followers...

Although Social Data insists that it only performs this information gathering technique, known as web scraping, on information that is already publicly accessible, this practice goes against the terms of use of the affected companies, which have indicated that they will take action. of legal redress if necessary.