#WeekendWisdom 074 Data Scraping or Data Breaches
Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 74. This week we’re going to talk about Data Scraping or Data Breaches?
Why am I asking the question “Data Scraping or Data Breaches”?
In recent weeks, three of the large social media companies have had lots and lots of personal data exposed online by cybercriminals. Now these social media companies are claiming that these were data that were scraped from their services. That this information that is already in the public domain.
These may have been Data Scraping
In the case of Clubhouse which had 1.3 million records exposed and LinkedIn which had 500 million records exposed. Yes all of the data that was exposed is stuff that you can see on their platforms. You can see this information very publicly on their platforms. That’s a reasonable expectation. That’s what you use these sites for.
But my issue here is that LinkedIn and Clubhouse should have done much more. They could prevent data being exposed and scraped like that, in such mass quantities. That stuff can be slowed down. It can be made non-economical.
So yes, that was data scraping, maybe not really a data breach but more should have been done.
But this one is definitely a Data Breach
Facebook, which had 533 million records exposed, this is a different situation. They had my mobile number and I had only given it to them for the purpose of authenticating my log on and I had set it to not expose that information to the public. My mobile number was exposed to the public. So therefore that is a data breach, simple as.
Facebook are being disingenuous with their claim that this was data scraping.
So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.
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