Instagram in trouble as nearly 50 million users' data gets leaked online
In what could spell further embarrassment for social media giant Facebook, a massive database containing the contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. Reports suggest, as many as 49 million accounts have been compromised.
The database was left exposed without a password online, allowing anyone to access it.
According to reports, each record contained public data scraped from influencer Instagram accounts, including their bio, profile picture, the number of followers they have, if they’re verified and their location by city and country.
The database also contained their private contact information, such as the Instagram account owner’s email address and phone number.
According to Facebook, scraping data of any kind is prohibited on Instagram, but it's still unclear how the data was procured or how it may have been used.
As Facebook works to emphasize privacy, it will have to address Instagram's vulnerabilities as well.
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This discovery comes just after Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook has been heavily criticised by the European leaders.
Just like Friday, the European Commission - which is the independent executive arm of the European Union - rebuked tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle fake news.
"We discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users," Facebook said in a blog post.
"We will be notifying these users as we did the others. Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed," the social network said.
Facebook, Instagram's parent company, revealed last month that the unencrypted passwords of hundreds of millions of users had been stored, putting the number of Instagram users affected in the tens of thousands, news agency AFP reported.