It seems like problem for Facebook-owned Instagram is not looking to slow down. A few days back, the company has been filed with a lawsuit that claims that Instagram is saving and using biometric and facial recognition data without the user’s permission. If they lose the lawsuit, they will have to pay around $500 billion. Now another information has been discovered about a bug that Instagram resolved earlier this year but did not let any user know about it.
As per the information, the bug made the Instagram app save all the phots and direct messages on its server, even after deletion. The bug was found by a security researcher and was paid $6,000 as bug bounty. The bug was reported on Instagram last year and the patch to resolve the issue was released earlier this year. Although it is not uncommon for many industries to keep the recently deleted data so that the users can restore them, Instagram was found to keep the data of the users which was deleted more than a year back.
As per the official information from Instagram, they only keep data up to 90 days from the date of deletion after which it is completely removed. The company confirmed that there was no instance of abuse and the issue has completely been resolved. However, it does bring a question into the minds of users, as to how secure their data is, and do they actually know what is happening with their data at the given point of time. Instagram has faced many issues in the past related to data leakage and it seems that the company still needs to work a lot in this area.