Nearly 1.5 million pictures from dating apps have been made available online.
How? Anyone with the link was able to view the private photos from five platforms developed by M.A.D Mobile: kink sites BDSM People and Chica, and LGBT apps Pink, Brish and Translove.
Many of these pictures are explicit.
This isn’t just a question of moral privacy – people can be made vulnerable to hackers and extortionists.
Bizarrely, despite the fact that 800,000 – 900,000 people use these apps, M.A.D Mobile took two months to fix the issue and have not come out with an explanatory statement.
Ethical hacker Aras Nazarovas from Cybernews alerted the firm in January after finding the online storage used by the apps by analysing the code that powers the services.
“The first app I investigated was BDSM People, and the first image in the folder was a naked man in his thirties,” he said.
“As soon as I saw it I realised that this folder should not have been public.”
To make matters worse, some of these pictures had been sent through DM, and were not actually posted on the profiles.
