The social network Instagram, owned by Facebook, kept the images and messages deleted by users on the servers for more than a year.
The company claims that the situation was caused by a technical problem, which it has now fixed, TechCrunch reports.
The problem was discovered by computer security expert Saugat Pokharel, who requested a copy of his data from the platform. Among them he discovered images and messages deleted a long time ago.
Pokharel received $ 6,000 from Instagram for discovering the “error.” He reported this in October 2019, but the company fixed the problem only this month.
It’s not just Instagram that has kept the data deleted
Normally, the information is not immediately deleted from Instagram servers. It should take at most 90 days for this to happen. Similar problems have been discovered on other platforms in the past, including Twitter.
Pokharel discovered the situation because Instagram offers the possibility to download data. The tool was introduced in 2018 after the implementation of GDPR legislation in Europe.
In other regions, however, users are not protected by such rules and cannot verify whether or not their data has been deleted from the servers of the companies whose services they use.
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