Some Vine Users’ Email Addresses, Phone Numbers Exposed
Like stumbling onto a bunch of Pitbull songs some ex put in your music library four years ago, the ghost of video-sharing platform Vine continues to haunt the internet. See, even though Vine is dead and gone, its cache of user information is not — and now some of that data has apparently been leaked.
In a blog post today Twitter-owned Vine announced that it had fixed a bug affecting the Vine Archive, where old content, along with email addresses and phone numbers associated with user accounts are stored.
Vine says that the bug had the potential to expose this information to third parties under certain circumstances.
“We have already notified all affected account holders for whom we have a verified email address on file, so if you weren’t notified, you most likely weren’t affected,” the post states.
The Verge reports that Vine Support sent out a mass email to former Vine users today, notifying them that an investigation found their information was exposed.
While the company says that the unsheltered credentials can’t be used to access accounts and that it is unaware of any incidents in which the information was misused, affected users should be cautious of any unsolicited emails.
Vine ended its glorious run back in January, months after Twitter announced it would shutter the service. In Nov. 2016, Twitter said it would replace the Vine app with the Vine Camera app that would connect to Twitter instead of having its own social network.
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