Instagram To Reward Researchers Who Uncover Abuse Of User Data

Vaibhav Kapadia - Oct 07, 2019


Instagram To Reward Researchers Who Uncover Abuse Of User Data

In this new program of Instagram, security researchers who discover evidence of third-party apps abusing users’ personal data will receive a bounty

In this new program of Instagram, security researchers who discover evidence of third-party apps abusing users’ personal data will receive a bounty. The aim of this program is to encourage experts as well as Facebook – Instagram’s parent company to deal with a big problem that the social network is facing: apps scraping the personal data of users or attempt to trick users into sharing sensitive information like passwords.

The program’s name is Data Abuse Bounty, and it’s another version of Facebook’s bugs bounty program. Typically in the traditional version, researchers will be paid when identifying vulnerabilities that hackers would be able to exploit then steal information.

Dan Gurfinkel – the security engineering manager of Instagram, wrote:

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However, how much the company would pay security researchers was not specified. It said that the bounty would be based on their reports’ impact as well as quality.

In the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a Britain political consultancy got millions of records on Facebook users from a third-party application developer. After the scandal, in April last year, there was a similar program rolled out for Instagram’s parent company.

The personal information was shared is against the policies of Facebook. However, the company had no way of following what happened after the data was first collected by the third-party application developer. Responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook’s bug bounty project was expanded to include not only cybersecurity flaws but also information abuse.

Instagram-bounty-program
Responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook’s bug bounty project was expanded to include not only cybersecurity flaws but also information abuse

Nam Nguyen, the engineering lead of Instagram, stated:

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Moreover, Facebook is asking app developers to support the identification of flaws in the Checkout feature, which allows Instagram users to purchase without switching to another app. Currently, the service is available to American users as well as in the beta version for businesses, which means that only a small amount of retailers can use the service for selling in America.

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