Your Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn Data May Have Been Leaked in the Past Month
I hate to say “this is kind of the norm” when it comes to data breaches, but we’ll start again. The social media company Socialarks recently suffered from a leak of more than 408GB of personal data from approximately 214 million Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts worldwide. That’s about 318 million individual entries, according to researchers at Safety Detectives , who published a comprehensive report on the hack.
The good news is that if there is any repercussion from such a massive data breach, it is that your passwords are safe, and any financial information associated with your accounts is also safe. This is because Socialarks built its database, which only became leaked by pulling publicly available information through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn – a practice these companies generally discourage .
In fact, the only information leaked was information that you, as an active user of social networks, in any case allow anyone to see. But this does not make it any better, and even excusable; If anything, this should be a great reminder that it might be time to cut down on what you freely share with the world, as there are many companies more than willing to use this information to create profiles about you.
In the case of Socialarks, the information the company collected from various Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn users included:
- Your full name
- Phone numbers and email addresses
- Usernames
- Profile picture
- Number of likes / subscribers
- Position
- Names of connected social media accounts (on LinkedIn)
Even more disturbing, writes Safety Detectives, is information that somehow fell into the hands of Socialarks, but which was not publicly available:
However, according to our findings, the Socialarks database stored personal data of Instagram and LinkedIn users, such as private phone numbers and email addresses for users who did not disclose such information publicly on their accounts. How Socialarks could have accessed such data at all remains unknown.
It is also surprising that such a large, active and data-rich database was left completely unsecured (probably for the second time).
While there is nothing you can do about this violation right now – I haven’t even seen a tool you can use to check if your accounts are affected or not – it’s worth taking a look at the normal Have I Been Pwned routine to see if this is a violation of their collection. If so, you can run a quick email search to see if you were hurt.
However, you may want to rethink how much information you post publicly to your various social media accounts. You can easily check this on Facebook using the View As (eyeball) button on your profile page:
The Facebook Privacy Checkup tool is also a great way to quickly understand what you are sharing with everyone and make some adjustments if necessary.
On Instagram, just open your profile and delete any details you don’t want the world to see. Or make your profile private if you don’t mind losing likes from strangers on the Internet. (They will have to follow you, and you will have to approve this before they see what you post.)
LinkedIn has an incredibly useful tool with which you can view your public profile and quickly customize whatever you share on it. In fact, I’d say it’s even better than anything you find on Facebook or Instagram. You can quickly turn your entire public profile on and off, control which people can view your profile photo, and edit which sections of your LinkedIn profile you want the public to see:
Even if you are not worried about the data breach on Socialarks, or you use other social networks even more often than Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, now is the right time to think about the information you share publicly. If you don’t need to share it with people who are not affiliated with you, it might be best to delete or block it. Be aware of your privacy.