Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How is instagram spying on me? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 months ago by countrypunk@slrpnk.net to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I want to preface this by saying that yes, I know that Instagram is bad. I am planning to get rid of it in the future but as of now I have to keep it for communication with people who are only on that platform.

So I have grapheneOS, use protonvpn (free version), use mull as my browser, and do not have google play services enabled on my phone. I do have some apps downloaded through aurora store such as Instagram, whatsapp, mychart, and mint mobile, but the rest came from f-droid.

I have noticed multiple times that after having private conversations on matrix, I get Instagram content in my feed that is scarily accurate to the conversation I had on the other platform immediately after. I know that things discussed in Instagram direct messages and group chat will give suggested content based on those conversations, but I get stuff that that is very specific to what I have ONLY discussed on matrix and didn't look up via my browser.

So my question is how is Instagram doing this and what can I do to mitigate the spying it's doing on my other apps. Thanks.

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[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If the only thing you use it for is chat, I think you can chat with instagram users on FB messenger instead, which you can then heavily restrict in terms of the OS permissions you give to it.

[–] countrypunk@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Wait, really? Can I log in with my Instagram account onto it? If so that's great news because the main reason I'm keeping it right now is the chat, but sometimes get sucked into the content vortex.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure, I think it may use an FB account. But you could make one specifically for this one use-case and then nuke your IG account.

[–] countrypunk@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 months ago

Facebook is pretty strict with their account creation stuff compared to Instagram. On Instagram it's easy to make a bunch of alts and keep them. I tried to make an account on Facebook to access marketplace a long time ago and it got banned and they wanted my real name and ID to access the account.