LocalBlox a data telemetry firm is said to have used sensitive info from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Zillow platforms to create a ‘3-dimensional’ picture of over 48 million users. A report from security firm UpGuard said that the information was used for advertising or political campaigns.
What’s more alarming in this whole saga is the fact that the created profile data was stored on Amazon S3 Storage Bucket which was not even secured by a password protection. Sources of UpGuard add that the entire 1.2 Terabyte file which contained the sensitive info such as date of births, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, and names was available for download and could have spilled to the dark web.
The website of LocalBlox claims that its detection tools automatically crawl, discover, extract, index, maps and augment data in a variety of formats from web and exchange networks.
Though, the firm denies using the sourced data on the various ad and political campaigns, ZDNet claims that the info was indeed used by some governments in some countries for their own benefits.
Very recently, Facebook agreed that data from over 87-million American user profiles was leaked to Cambridge Analytica which was later used by the company to influence the 2016 elections of United States.
Now, the latest UpGuard report has paved the way to another data scandal which points fingers on Social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Just questions to think- Will a ban on social media and on Smart Phones curtail data privacy concerns?
You can share your views through the comments section below.
