IG's Privacy and Security violations

dhruvtalksstech
Apr 8, 2023
6 min read

Instagram has us by the neck and is strangling all of us without breaking a sweat. The world's most popular social media among teens has catastrophic effects on our mental well-being. An IG user spends at least 30 mins on the app daily. This number is over 1.5 hours for the majority of teens. 88% of IG users live outside the US with India having the largest IG user population at a staggering 230 million (that's more people than all of Brazil). Facebook and WhatsApp both have over 2 billion users each. And all these are owned by Meta. And Meta's CEO is none other than Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, "PUNK GENIUS TRAITOR BILLIONAIRE". I don't want someone who rated undergrad females on the basis of their hotness in college while he was drunk and 19 to be in charge of all my data.

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Because of weak regimes in places, hacking is also rampant. Every other day, we get to hear about celebrities whose IG accounts got hacked. But what about us common netizens? In 2021, a girl at my school had her acc hacked and frozen twice. In the first incident, she was receiving emails about someone trying to log into her account several times. She could not, in turn, determine who it was or revoke the access. This points out the glaring loopholes in IG's security frame. The second incident was even worse - she was not able to do anything. She was not able to send messages, change the profile pictures, post stories, log out, or even change the password.

Changing the password and increasing encryption are the first things that come to our mind whenever we find anything suspicious but she was not able to do even that. If I were to determine the reason, I would say that after gaining access to her account, the hacker must have revoked the "trusted" status of her devices where she had already logged in and was using IG such as her phone and laptop. As with Yudhishthir in the Mahabharata, I believe that the victim is as much at fault as the perpetrator in such cases. After diving deeper, I found out that she had not turned on 2-step verification which is the most crucial layer of security, and that she had not reported the incident to IG. Till now, she has not been able to ascertain any reason why her account was behaving so weirdly or who was behind the hacking attempt.

What's worse on IG's part is that there is no framework to guide and assist people who go through similar cases. They should develop a proper helpline or at least a Q&A page that people can refer to in dire times. She had to delete 2 accounts and her current one is her 3rd account. All of this is bad not only from a privacy viewpoint but also from a business standpoint. I am also a staunch capitalist. I understand that the first priority is always to generate the maximum revenue and that sometimes means prioritizing the algorithm over user safety but such levels of negligence leave users feeling unsafe on their platform which is entirely built on the idea of social structure and validation. I am not saying that we should ban social media apps. I am just vocal about stricter laws surrounding privacy and better self-regulation. Privacy has to come from within. It has to be an internal movement coupled with external pressure and rising user concern. Do we really want to give a company like Meta so much control over her life? They influence our every little decision without us even realizing it

Instagram's malicious tracking and privacy infringement practices are not confined to any one individual or a group of persons. It is one of the most widespread problems plaguing our modern society. You may feel that something like this has never happened to you so the problem is not consequential. Chances are someone you know very well has gone through the experience but you know nothing about it since people are shy about coming forward about personal hacking and phishing incidents. That's what happened to me - one of my friends recently opened up to me about someone impersonating her by creating a fake account (catfishing).

It was in the early days of 2020. She found out that someone had created a fake account of hers using her name and pictures. Her original account was not public so the person impersonating her was among the followers. He/She took screenshots of her posts and pictures and used those to set the profile picture on the fake account. The person even made a few posts just like those on the genuine account. By the time my friend found out about the fake account, that account already had over 50 followers and a lot of mutuals since people could not differentiate between the 2 accounts and just assumed that she may have created a new account.

Like everyone, her first step was to report and block the account and block all the other unknown followers on the fake account. It is an open secret that whenever an IG account is created, you get a lot of follow requests from obscene and pornographic accounts. That was the case with that fake account too. Since the creator of that fake account meant harm to her, the account was public and the creator accepted requests from all the obscene followers. Now imagine bad elements in society going through your photos. This problem is especially concerning for girls considering they are prone to such attacks and that pictures of girls are a lot more likely to be used misappropriately. That was the case with her too. She was extremely terrified and felt vulnerable. She urged everyone in her circle to report the account with an attempt to have the account suspended but it took Instagram 4 long months to finally take action and strike down the account.

One can only imagine what that must have felt like. Our social media handles are extensions of us and I call them digital diaries. The harrowing incident had a deep effect on her mental health. So much so that after the incident, she deleted her IG account forever fearing another such attack. She is not the only girl facing such attacks. The WSJ reported that a majority of teen girls do not feel safe on Facebook and Instagram and are leaving the platform in droves. Girls who are popular at school and in society are especially vulnerable to facing such attacks. It is difficult to come forward after such incidents fearing judgment but she did. All such victims I know have spent hours crying in corners where no one could see them and some of them have even had suicidal thoughts. All of this is not superficial. It is the dark reality of the social media apps we hold so near and dear.

Remember that behind all the fancy filters lie thousands of people whose entire lives have been completely ruined because of IG's rampant privacy and security threats. In order to prevent such incidents from happening to you, follow these steps -

1) choose who you let follow you on IG very carefully. A couple more followers here and there are not going to make you successful. Don't fall into the pretentious trap of trying to feel famous and important through social media apps

2) be very wary of the posts and stories you put up

3) if you really want to post freely, I recommend creating a separate account where you just have people in your inner circle as your followers and don't allow anyone else to follow you (this approach is otherwise known as a private account)

4) IG's customer care service sucks but it is no harm to try writing to them if you are a victim of any similar problems

5) if you are suspicious of any of your followers, don't hesitate at all to block, restrict, or remove them from your account altogether. Learn how to say "no" in such cases. Your privacy and personal life are the most important. Everything else is secondary

6) report such cases to the authorities immediately