Single case study

In an era where user data is currency, the boundary between public information and private security is becoming increasingly blurred. The rise of data scraping—a technique used to collect publicly available data at scale—has opened new doors for businesses, but also new vulnerabilities. A number of high-profile incidents have shown how scraped data, when not properly secured or anonymized, can quickly turn into a privacy crisis.

What Happened

Several tech giants have come under fire after massive amounts of user data were scraped from their platforms and later found circulating on hacker forums. In one such incident, over 500 million user records from a major social media platform were exposed, including names, phone numbers, locations, and email addresses. Although the data was technically collected from public profiles, the scale and accessibility of the leak raised serious privacy and ethical concerns.

The companies involved argued that no systems were breached and that the data came from legitimate means. However, the public and regulators saw things differently. The incident highlighted the thin line between data accessibility and user privacy—and how easily even non-sensitive data can be exploited when compiled at scale.