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

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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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[–] 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.

[–] Deello@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

My car has an aux cable to connect to my phone. The cable died again so I've been rediscovering the radio and I've been been hearing commercials for whatsapp. They advertise E2EE as a feature. What you are saying is a contradiction to that. Is it possible to have E2EE AND have them sell your convo to third parties?

[–] 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