235M Instagram, Tiktok, And YouTube Profiles Exposed In Database Breach

Source: Christian Wiediger/Unsplash

A databased containing scraped data of nearly 235 million social media users from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube was exposed without any password protection. It contained user information such as names, contact info, images, and stats about followers.

Web scraping is a technique of gathering data from web pages in an automated manner. While it’s not illegal, social media companies prohibit this practice to protect user data. However, a lot of analytics companies create large databases of user information by using web scrapers on popular sites. Some of these companies often sell insights from these databases to other firms.

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