Privacy

31981 readers

350 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] TheSun 5 points 3 months ago (9 children)

Use the user profiles feature of grapheneos to make a "social" profile and only use that to access Instagram / facebook.

Meta sells your convo data on WhatsApp for ads, if you use it you will get targeted ads regardless.

Other options are signal (Molly on fdroid), simplex, etc.

[–] countrypunk 1 points 3 months ago

Unfortunately I do have WhatsApp and I absolutely cannot get rid of that unless I cut off all my older family members who don't know how to use anything else (which I don't wanna do). I'm gonna put Instagram on a separate profile like you recommended, but can't for WhatsApp because that'll mean I can't pick up calls and the likes. I do have molly and quite like it, but only have a couple of friends on it that I've managed to convince to switch. I hope to get more on there from Instagram in the future, but will have to wait for when I am better friends with those people and less of a weird acquaintance.

The only place I get any ads nowadays is on Instagram, but I'm assuming that after I am rid of that they'll still have a shadow profile on me in the background.

Also, another question: what is the network permission on graphene OS? I haven't been able to find a clear answer about it on the net.

Thanks.

load more comments (8 replies)