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kitotik

It seems that the data was not all public, so this was more than just aggregated scraped public info.

So that means Chatr did some combination of:

- Directly exploit the Instagram API bug before it was patched

- purchased the leaked data from a 3rd party

edit: formatting

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> At the time of writing, the database had over 49 million records — but was growing by the hour.

This implies it's still going, so not related to the patched bug.

Which begs the question... how are they now, currently, scraping and adding people's phone numbers from public accounts?

Due to lack of strong data protection law in India and awareness, I won't be surprised if its been purchased from a 3rd party.

There are some "Indian startup" groups on Facebook, where it's common for people to sell such databases, and nobody asks if the seller has consent from the people in the database. Such posts also never gets taken down, or the seller doesn't get blocked from the group.

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