Some weeks ago, I saw an ad (sponsored post) on Instagram that surprised me. It was about a product I never googled, shared, liked, or talked about on any social network even in direct messages. I had a bad intuition: the only time this product came up was in a random chat with a couple of friends in a cafe.

And the only way for Instagram to know about this was to listen to my real life conversations with the microphone. Last week, I did an experiment to confirm this and the result is just as scary as you can imagine. I speak Spanish, French and English. I usually mix these three languages.

At first glance, the Instagram security bug that was exploited to obtain celebrities' phone numbers and e-mail addresses appeared to be limited, possibly to a small number of celebrity accounts.

Now a database of 10,000 credentials published online Thursday night suggests the breach is much bigger. The database was provided by someone who e-mailed in response to Thursday's story, mentioned above, about the Instagram breach. The sender said he was able to scrape personal data belonging to 6 million users and was selling the data in a searchable website for $10 per query. The person provided a sample of 10,000 of those records.

An Instagram bug allowed hackers to access contact phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile users, the company said today. The bug was discovered recently in Instagram’s application programming interface, or API, which the service uses to communicate with other apps.

Instagram declined to specify which users had been targeted, but the news comes two days after hackers accessed the account of its most-followed user, Selena Gomez, and posted nude pictures of her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber. The company has notified all of its verified account holders of the possible leak of their contact information. 

Instagram is rated as the worst social media platform when it comes to its impact on young people's mental health, a UK snapshot survey suggests.

The poll asked 1,479 people aged 14-24 to score popular apps on issues such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, bullying and body image. Instagram said keeping the platform a safe and supportive place for young people was a top priority. Mental health charities urged companies to act to increase users' safety. The Royal Society for Public Health study says social platforms should flag up heavy social media use and identify users with mental health issues.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, VK, Google's Picasa and Youtube were handing over user data access to a Chicago-based Startup which then sold this data to law enforcement agencies for surveillance purposes.

Government records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the big technology corporations gave "special access" to Geofeedia. Geofeedia is a controversial social media monitoring tool that pulls social media feeds via APIs and other means of access and then makes it searchable and accessible to its clients, who can search by location or keyword to quickly find recently posted and publicly available contents.

How to hack an Instagram account? The answer to this question is difficult to find, but a bug bounty hunter just did it without too many difficulties. Belgian bug bounty hunter Arne Swinnen discovered two vulnerabilities in image-sharing social network Instagram that allowed him to brute-force Instagram account passwords and take over user accounts with minimal efforts.

Both brute-force attack issues were exploitable due to Instagram’s weak password policies and its practice of using incremental user IDs. "This could have allowed an attacker to compromise many accounts without any user interaction, including high-profile ones," Swinnen wrote.

Chances are that unless you pulled a Tom Hanks in Castaway, you have probably heard of Instagram by now. The image sharing network, owned by Facebook, has over 400 million active users per month that typically average over 80 million photos uploaded a day and garner 3.5 billion likes.

So needless to say, it’s pretty popular. A post last month discussed a spat between researchers and a bug reported to Facebook’s Bug Bounty Program got experts discussing how we use Instagram and how it is another area where we see too many users over-sharing. There are some tips on how to keep your Instagram safe.

Instagram just made good on its promise to clean up its site by purging all the inactive and bot accounts. And there were so many! In cleaning up its platform, Instagram lost millions of accounts just days after announcing it had reached a milestone of 300 million active users.

While Instagram doesn't seem too concerned – the company received a sky-high valuation this week of $35 billion from Citibank, much more than the $1 billion Mark Zuckerberg paid for it back in April 2013 – the same can't be said for some of its users, many of whom woke up to a reverse-Christmas scenario of sorts. Predictably, celebrities and public figures were hit pretty hard, although some fared worse than others. 

Last week Instagram announced that it was going to crack down hard on spammers and fake accounts. One social-media marketer said that it would be “chaos” and speculated that over 10 million accounts could be deleted. The crackdown kicked off this week, and people are freaking out.

As Instagram removes accounts that aren’t up to snuff with the company's community guidelines, users have watched their follower numbers plummet. One account by the name of miyoungnews reported losing over 100,000 followers in a matter of days. Thousands of users have been flooding the official Instagram account’s comments section to voice their fear and anger.

Mark Zuckerberg has been ordered to appear in an Iranian court to answer complaints the Facebook-owned applications Instagram and WhatsApp violate individuals' privacy.

The semi-official news agency INSA quoted Ruhollah Momen Nasab, an official with the paramilitary Basij force, as saying that the judge in the south of the country had also ordered the two services be blocked. Facebook owns both Instagram and WhatsApp. It is unlikely Mr Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, will appear in court because the US and Iran do not have an extradition treaty. Similar rulings have been issued in recent years and not been carried out. A separate Iranian court ordered last week that Instagram be blocked over privacy concerns.