Timehop has just admitted more personal information was compromised than they initially thought when their data was breached on July 4th.
Timehop is a popular app that shows users exactly what they were posting about on social media platforms on that day over the past 10+ years. 21 million users were thought to have had their names, email addresses and phone numbers compromised on July 4th, but now it seems these figures were not correct.
It now appears 18.6 million email addresses were compromised, and 15.5 million dates of birth. 3.3 million records were compromised that included names, email addresses, phone numbers and DOBs. The Timehop team spoke to TechCrunch addressing the issue:
“In our enthusiasm to disclose all we knew, we quite simply made our announcement before we knew everything.
With the benefit of staff who had been vacationing and unavailable during the first four days of the investigation, and a new senior engineering employee, as we examined the more comprehensive audit on Monday of the actual database tables that were stolen it became clear that there was more information in the tables than we had originally disclosed.
This was precisely why we had stated repeatedly that the investigation was continuing and that we would update with more information as soon as it became available.”
Timehop was keen to reiterate that their app does not hold any financial information from users and it does not perform detailed behavioural tracking. The ‘memories’, or older social media posts, were not compromised.