by Aysha Lewis
2021-08-13T05:00:00Z
A Look at Privacy on Instagram
If you genuinely want to know who someone is, ask them to show you their Instagram. The almighty algorithm heavily influences social circles, interests, and online purchases. Social media platforms that have mastered this aspect of learning each user are monetizing from higher sales. Influencers have the luxury of selling directly to customers on Instagram through targeted ads that expose potential buyers to your products multiple times a day. Although profits are high, so is the infringement of users’ privacy and personal identity.
Instagram has explicitly tailored its platform to serve the seller and make shopping highly convenient to customers. For this very reason, The “Shop” tab is now where the "Activity "tab used to be. Users adjust to these subtle changes every day. Still, they are not naive to the apps’ intentions of capitalizing from years of research on consumer habits strictly driven by our basic psychology and interests.
Show me your Instagram, and I’ll show you who you are
Instagram watches how you interact on other apps and grabs information from Google searches and even your conversation. Many Instagram users are surprised to see ads for products and services they searched for earlier that day or might have mentioned to a friend over the phone or in the office. Targeted marketing is the side of social media that can leave private citizens feeling preyed upon and exposed. In other words, iPhone and Android users aren’t given instructions on limiting or turning these settings off. informational Sites like suggest users restrict access to their phone’s microphone and better understand voice triggers that activate Siri and Google voice to collect certain kinds of data. This information serves third-party companies and sites. Most companies won’t let people know how their data is collected to continue mining information that gets marketers and advertisers paid. Companies rely on this data to efficiently target potential customers.
Protecting your privacy is more accessible than most people assume
A common question found in the Privacy Settings on Instagram is “How can I remove my Instagram images from Google search.” Users also want to know if a hashtag would make their private post public and what would happen if they share their Instagram on other social networks. These are concerns that most people have regarding information sharing and monitoring who can find them on social media. Anyone concerned with how much information an app can collect from their phone can go to settings, find any specific app, and limit its use of their phone’s location, photos, microphone, bluetooth, camera, and cellular data. An application’s use of location can be convenient for advertising local restaurants, services, and possibly warnings for extreme weather, amber alerts, and, more recently, alerts for areas experiencing high covid-19 outbreaks.
A few important privacy settings to check for
- The Ads setting on Instagram allows users to limit certain ad topics such as social issues and politics.
- “Data from partners” gives the user’s choice in where their data is used for personalized ads.
- Hiding an ad is also possible by clicking the three horizontal dots on the top right corner of any sponsored ad.
Privacy does its job when protecting users from unwanted interactions, hate speech, violent videos, and racist content. Still, it fails to give them options to fully protect themselves from aggressive advertisements and daily reminders of something they might have left in their cart a few days ago. Until social media evolves into a more user-conscious space. Privacy is something that social media users should take into their own hands while learning to be very specific about the information they are allowing to be shared about their personal preferences.