Whoops!
We’ve been seeing report after report of people’s personal information getting inadvertently (or through shadier means) leaked on the worldwide web, companies have certainly been trying to plug up these leaks to regain people’s trust and give them ways to see what data their site actually collects.
Last April, Instagram made a “Download Your Data” feature available to their millions upon millions of users. While it’s fantastic to have tools like this to see exactly what a particular company has on you, it seems like that a bug in the feature allowed for passwords to be listed for all eyes to see if you knew where to dig and as our source says — in plain text too. Instagram says that they’ve already solved the issue and that the people who have been affected by the faux pas have already been contacted, which been urged to change their passwords and have their browser data cleared as well. The company also says that only a small percentage of their users were affected by this mistake but we all know that could still mean a pretty big number.
It’s a bummer that some of the biggest companies in the world who should have the best security and protection for their users can be the source for information to leak out and while for the most part, it’s in their hands, there are some things we can do to protect our accounts such as changing your passwords often, not using the same passwords for all your accounts, and turning on two-factor authentication when you can.
These are a few extra steps that can be tedious but we think they’re well worth going through to keep your account a little safer from boo-boos like this one.