A popular social media app among teens and young adults made the news recently after a data breach. Wishbone, an app that allows you to poll your friends, was hacked.
More than 2.2 million email addresses and nearly 290,000 cellphone numbers were disclosed as part of the breach.
Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned, received a copy of a Wishbone database containing a “treasure trove of Wishbone users’ data, including 2,326,452 full names, 2,247,314 unique email addresses, 287,502 cellphone numbers, and other users’ personal data such as birthdates and gender,” according to this Motherboard story.
Science Inc., the owners of the app, confirmed the breach. They have since sent out a notification to users, which you can see here.
“The information involved in the incident included Wishbone users’ user names, any personal names provided by users during account registration, email addresses, and telephone numbers. If you elected to provide date of birth information, such information was also included in the incident. However, no passwords, user communications or financial account information were compromised in the incident,” the notification reads.
Keep in mind this is the private information of primarily underage kids, mostly female.
It’s for this reason that Hunt worries this serious data breach could put the victims in danger. He added the Wishbone data breach to his service, Have I Been Pwned, and sent out alerts to service subscribers on March 15, 2017.
So how does the Wishbone app work? The app “shows you two options and lets you vote on which one you like more — a spin on the popular ‘Would you rather’ hypothetical question,” this Business Insider UK story explains.
It caught on with the underage set almost instantly. Within four months of its release, the app numbered in the top 10 downloaded social networking apps in the iOS App store in the U.S, U.K., Canada and Australia, according to the App Annie blog.
More than a year ago, KidsPrivacy.net, a blog devoted to sharing “information and resources with other parents on raising kids in a digital world,” wrote a post about Wishbone, advocating that “parents should talk to their kids about sharing on Wishbone and protecting their information.”
While it might be too late for users of this app, it’s not too late to talk to your kids about this very subject.
Are you covered for identity theft?
Image: Pixabay