How Your Personal Data Is Being Scraped From Social Media
https://www.bbc.comMost people accept that whatever we put on our public profile page is out in the public domain.
So, how would you feel if all your information was catalogued by a hacker and put into a monster spreadsheet with millions of entries, to be sold online to the highest paying cyber-criminal? That’s what a hacker calling himself Tom Liner did last month “for fun” when he compiled a database of 700 million LinkedIn users from all over the world, which he is selling for around $5,000
The news has also set the cyber-security and privacy world alight with arguments about whether or not we should be worried about this growing trend of mega scrapes.
What’s important to understand here is that these databases aren’t being created by breaking into the servers or websites of social networks.
They are largely constructed by scraping the public-facing surface of platforms using automatic programmes to take whatever information is freely available about users.
