Quora Hack Exposed 100 Million Users. Should You Care? When you Google "What are the most used social apps in India?," Quora ranks among the top 10

Quora, the website that has gained its popularity owing to the umpteen questions that find answers on it helped by users worldwide, was hacked on November 30. A 100 million users' data was stolen by a third party. The more interesting quotient about the hack was that it didn't raise as many eyebrows.

When Quora sent an email to its users stating some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to its systems, users knew their account and user information, ex name, email, IP, user ID, encrypted password, user account settings, personalization data were compromised.

At a time when feeling secure online has become challenging owing to the recent breaches, namely the hotel group Marriott International Inc that led to the theft of personal data of a whopping 500 million customers and another one of Facebook that saw hackers gain unauthorized access to more than 30 million accounts, the Quora hack comes across as another massive one. But the furore is subdued, and that makes one wonder – Do people really care about Quora?

Is Quora Important to Anyone?

When you Google "What are the most used social apps in India?," Quora ranks among the top 10 social networking apps. A go-to place for all kinds of questions that are asked, answered, edited, and organized by its community of users in the form of opinions has won Quora this popularity.

Tilak Shrivastava, a marketer at German SaaS company ITyx Solutions, says people do care about Quora. But most importantly, people share limited data in the form of text on Quora. Hardly any visual data is shared on Quora, so less headache," says Shrivastava.

He feels the furore over the hack hasn't picked up as people are bothered about it but less vocal.

Joydeep Das, a service marketing specialist and brand consultant, too believes the effect of the Quora hack would be known only after some time.

However, he does not think the Quora hack will be an issue as it hardly deals with any personal information. "The main problem lies with the data linked with associate sign-in accounts since one can login there using other renowned social media sites like Facebook or so. So far there is no clarity on that front," says Das.

Data Protection is Vital

Quora in its email to users took onus of the hack and said the company recognizes that in order to maintain user trust, it needs to work very hard to make sure this does not happen again.

Karim Benaissa, the co-founder of the France-based Invitly, a networking app that enables professionals to meet through invites, thinks data protection is crucial.

"The fact that the answers provided within Quora are just opinions, I would not like to know that a third party got access to my account," says Benaissa.

Benaissa feels the Quora hack is different from the Facebook one considering Facebook is used by billions of users so when 80 millions of accounts have been hacked most of us got the feeling that this could have happened to us too."Quora is definitely not Facebook just if we compare the number of users so as usual people really care about something which speaks to them," thinks Benaissa.

California-based Quora has assured its users that the company is continuing to work very hard to remedy the situation, and it hopes over time to prove that it are worthy of user trust.