Viral decentralized social media platform friend.tech refutes report of user data leak

The team behind the popular decentralized social media platform friend.tech has denied claims made in a report that the personal information of over 100,000 users was leaked. The report, initially published by The Block, suggested that the leaked data was posted by Banteg, a developer for Yearn Finance. However, friend.tech clarified that the information had been scraped from its public API, comparing it to looking at someone's public Twitter feed. They criticized the report as "irresponsible".

Community notes dismiss leak claims

Contributors to X's (formerly known as Twitter) Community Notes also weighed in, stating that the underlying data scraped from friend.tech's public API was public and could be accessed by anyone through a block explorer. The database only scrapes public information. This supports friend.tech's argument that the information was not leaked but rather obtained from their public API.

Scraper publishes publicly available data

Banteg, the developer in question, originally published a repository on GitHub containing the publicly available scraped data, which included wallet addresses on Base linked to corresponding Twitter usernames for over 101,000 users. They noted that over 101,000 people had given friend.tech access to post on their behalf.

Criticism of interpretation

Banteg criticized the inaccurate interpretation of their initial post, suggesting that it had been misrepresented in the report. Meanwhile, users on X joined in on the situation, with one user humorously claiming to have found a "leaked database showing ALL transactions on eth" and sharing a link to the Ethereum block explorer.

Spot On Chain discovers friend.tech's API reveals specific information

Blockchain analytics service Spot On Chain highlighted that friend.tech's API revealed certain sets of information not immediately available to everyday users of the app. For example, the API allowed access to wallets created by specific users. When asked about the potential use of this information, Spot On Chain explained that it could be exploited by bots to immediately purchase shares of larger accounts as soon as they signed up to friend.tech. They noted that many bots had already taken advantage of this.

Since its beta launch on August 11, friend.tech has witnessed significant user engagement, with over 934,000 unique transactions and a trading volume of 34,320 Ether (ETH), equivalent to $57,101,116 at current prices.