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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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
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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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[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Probably because your friends search about it when they are not having things separated and based on the social graph that IG thinks you're interested in it too?

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

None of my matrix friends are on Instagram and vice versa

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago

That can be your friends' friend/family doing the search. The social graph is never being 1 degree only.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago

Plus if you were in the same location they probably lean harder on the things that overlap. They have so much data about you that this is easy for them to do.