Biggest Social Media Data Leaks This Year So Far
As data becomes the goldmine of all time, April of 2021 has shown nothing but a continuous leakage of this resource.
Several tech companies have had user data breached which has led to public exposure of private user information.
It is as if we have given up on the fight for privacy from companies that hold our data online, so here are some notable breaches that have since occurred in the past couple of days.
This is a list of platforms where your data may have been compromised as of the time of this publication, but we shall update it as time goes. Or hopefully not.
Facebook is no guest to allegations of weak privacy and manipulation of user data. Mark Zuckerberg has been taking blows since the days of Cambridge Analytic, and now data leakage issues are catching up with him.
At the beginning of April 2021, data belonging to half a billion users including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios, and in some cases email addresses was published online.
A Facebook spokesperson came out to admit this leak, saying it is a vulnerability issue from 2019 that was fixed.
However, this does not erase the fact that your data is out there somewhere in a low-level hack group on the internet. Facebook has also added that they shall not be informing users that their information was exposed by this massive breach.
LinkedIn has always managed to set itself apart from other social media platforms with its corporate lingo and “humble brags”.
The last thing I expected was a data compromise of a magnitude exceeding 500 million accounts, in a platform that has just about 700 million accounts.
This means that more than two-thirds of users on that platform have had their data taken over by a hacker who went ahead to put them up on sale online.
LinkedIn has confirmed this leek, saying that the data they have seen compromised so far is only publicly available user information.
Clubhouse
Nothing more heartbreaking than seeing a new kid on the block mess up, and with the scale that Clubhouse is being reported to have hit.
Introduced as an invite-only app in 2020 and gaining popularity with its audio feature, Clubhouse has suffered a blow to its reputation in April 2021 where according to a report, 1.3 million users have had their data scraped but mostly publicly available information.
On Twitter, the company came out to say “Clubhouse has not been breached or hacked. The data referred to is all public profile information from our app, which anyone can access via the app or our API (application programming interface).”
It would appear that these leaks are an ordinary thing because barely a long time elapses before a leak hits some of the leading corporations.
As we shift to be online more, it’s imperative to protect your privacy and stay secure.
