Data Breach Report From Instagram Raises Concerns About Upcoming Facebook’s Digital Currency

Facebook, the most popular social network in the world, has been affected by different data leaks over the last years. This has harmed users and individuals that had data stored on their platform. Now, the security researcher Anurag Sen discovered that there was a public Amazon Web Services (AWS) database that had the information of over 49 million Instagram accounts. Instagram is owned by Facebook.

We Should Be Careful About Facebook’s Coin

As this new report shows, information of 49 million users from Instagram has been published, exposing a large number of users and their data. Email addresses, phone numbers, and more private information have been exposed.

The database is owned by the social media marketing firm called Chtrbox. The firm has also calculated the net worth of each of the accounts.

During a conversation with TechCrunch, Facebook commented:

“We’re looking into the issue to understand if the data described – including email and phone numbers – was from Instagram or from other sources.”

This is not the first and not the last time that Facebook will be facing such kinds of accidents. Just a month ago, UpGaurd, a security firm, revealed that they were able to find hundreds of millions of private Facebook user records using third-party databases on Amazon.

It is worth mentioning that in August 2017, the company was affected by a hacker that obtained and sold email addresses and phone numbers of around 6 million Instagram users. At the same time, in 2018, malicious individuals were able to gather a large amount of information from 50 million users.

This shows that Facebook has always failed to protect users’ data and privacy. Now, Facebook is working on the so-called Project Libra, a crypto-related initiative that aims at launching a blockchain network and digital currency, according to rumors. The main intention is to start offering payment and transactional services to individuals on WhatsApp in the Indian market.

The Facebook Coin is expected to be useful for users in India that want to send and receive payments. However, it will be important for users to know that their privacy is not going to be respected and their financial information might be published.