August 22, 2020: Due to the dubious storage methods, a social media analytics company has exposed hundreds of million user profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Apparently, Social Data, a company known for legally selling influential social media users' data to marketing companies, did not even incorporate password protection nor set-up any authentication process to access the database. Some hackers got their hands on this data and dumped it in dark websites.

According to reports, this database contained user information like names, contact information, images and statistics about followers.

According to the researchers, the leaked data points to a company called Deep Social banned by both Facebook and Instagram in 2018 after scraping user profile data.

Web scraping is an automated process of pulling information from websites and social media sites. Unless the users or the host company has given permission, it is considered legal, or else it will be deemed as a serious crime for violating user privacy protocols.