Paris (AFP)
The social network Instagram, owned by Facebook, cut off access to its platform to a US advertising startup, Hyp3r, accused of misusing the data shared by its users, according to a statement sent Thursday to AFP.
"Hyp3r's practices were not approved and violate our rules", and "therefore we removed them from our platform," said the image-sharing network, which claims a billion users worldwide .
Instagram also claims to have made a technical change to prevent other companies from automatically retrieving user data from location pages, which will no longer be publicly available.
According to the online Business Insider, Hyp3r, based in San Francisco, California, has researched and saved data shared publicly by "millions of Instagram users" visiting certain locations (hotels, casinos, airports, clubs sports, etc.) to build detailed descriptions of people who are then exploited by advertisers.
According to screenshots of Hyp3r's interfaces and media information, the company compiled users' whereabouts, personal biographies, and even "story" photos that typically lasted for 24 hours.
The volume of data obtained and backed up by Hyp3r is not known, but the company boasted of having "a unique database of hundreds of millions of high value consumers around the world".
The issue of data privacy of social network users is a particularly sensitive topic for Facebook, which was fined $ 5 billion by the US federal authorities in July for "misleading" users on their website. ability to control the confidentiality of their personal information.
This followed the Cambridge Analytica scandal, named after an English company accused of misusing the data of 87 million users of the world's largest social network to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
As a marketing partner of Facebook, Hyp3r first used the accesses provided by the social network to interact with the Instagram platform. But when certain access options, including the ability to search from specific locations, were reduced following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Hyp3r would have developed its own technique to access information that is now unavailable, according to Business Insider.
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