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? (self.privacy)

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

82 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] Onihikage@beehaw.org 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

They advertise E2EE as a feature

They can call it E2EE as much as they want, but it's a lie. It's encrypted in transit and at rest, at least on the user's device, but unlike true E2EE, they can decrypt and view any conversation they want to.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-privacy-protections-for-its-2-billion-whatsapp-users

[–] Deello@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

So E2EE but they have a copy of the keys to use at their discretion. Cool, we have digital landlords now.

E2EE* plaintext with extra steps

[–] Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run 3 points 3 months ago

This is particularly insidious, as they claim to use the same encryption as Signal, developed by Open Whisper Systems. But Meta allows themselves access. 2 billion users. SMH.

[–] countrypunk 1 points 3 months ago

Does this also apply to calls?