I encountered a very peculiar incident on Instagram that aroused a certain mistrust and concern about the manipulation of Instagram. I Had an old Instagram account, which was about 2 -3 Years old, and had sufficient watch time for various forms of Content. I respect Instagram user tracking to a certain extent as it gives proper suggestions to my taste and what I like to watch, unlike its substitute. Recently I created a secondary account for research purposes, The account had a name, Profile pic, and nothing else. The secondary account had no watch time hours, and Instagram did not have any idea what I liked to watch on that account. The only thing I routinely did was to check the profile of my new account from my old account.
The first thing I noticed was that Instagram constantly reminded me to watch something or the other on Instagram, it gave notifications to watch some kind of trending reels and some recommended posts, but I did not click on them or watch any of the content as part of my experiment. I was okay with Instagram showing trending posts and it did not indicate anything fishy. A few days later when I just opened that account just to see my feed I was shocked to see that I could see the same reels I saw in the other account. I went into the thought that Instagram was not only gathering data from my existing account but also my old account or in other words it possessed the ability to retain and correlate data across multiple accounts no matter if I visited it or not, creating a somewhat personalized user experience that blurred the boundaries between privacy and personalization.
I was okay with Instagram gathering details from the post I watched from my new account and giving me suggestion about it. In this case, it gathered details from my old account. I want to make something very clear I had no followers on my new account, and the account had a completely different email address. The only thing I did was see the profile of my new account from my old account.
The second thing I noticed was getting profile suggestions, which were the following of old accounts. This meant that it also tracked which account my old account watched, going into that account and giving personalized posts of my profile viewer. In such a situation so many things can go wrong. Someone's browsing habits can be exposed to someone other without their their consent. That is pretty illegal.
That was not it, I started getting spam from that new email I made my experiment account with most of them were promotional, and I started receiving ads on the website and my feed on both accounts. It was truly alarming to see products I searched on Amazon on my old completely different account, come in a completely new account with a gateway as simple as a profile click.
Image credits: Souvik Banerjee | Unsplash
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