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Blocking Pinterest may reduce your data usage
- cute_boi 6y ago> "You might want to block Pinterest to save your data" The irony is when the website that is posting such stuff consumes > 1mb for simple blog due to all the trackers etc.
- sneak 6y agoYou might want to turn off background app refresh entirely, as otherwise you are providing your coarse tracklog (not that anyone goes anywhere these days) via GeoIP lookup to every app that does background refreshes, even when you don't have them open. Presumably you don't want every sketchy app on your phone knowing a complete log of dates and times you switch from your home wifi to 4G (leaving home) or from 4G to your work wifi (arriving at work). I was astounded at how many background apps are constantly phoning home on iOS when I monitored the traffic. I recommend the app Charles Proxy for this.
- sherlock_h 6y agoMy wife also has the same issue. Of her 5 GB Internet package each month, around 4 GB is spent on Pinterest. No idea where it‘s coming from
- the-dude 6y agoHow do you know this?
- sherlock_h 6y agoiPhone usage stats
- szundi 6y agoWomen like pinterest more often than not
- rukshn 6y agoWhere are you from? I’d love to know whether it is for a single region
- sherlock_h 6y agoGermany
- mobilio 6y agoDisable Background App Refresh for that app
- charliebrownau 6y agoIf your using Android, check out Android GO Or just disable Internet data on mobile phone togther, limit to wifi
- thangngoc89 6y agoReading this made me realized how cheap Internal data is in Viet Nam. - 4G: 2GB per day for less than 4 USD each month (89k VND/month) - Home Fiber optics network with guaranteed 35Mbps/35Mbps: unlimited for less than 10 USD each month (220k VND/month).
- gowthamgts12 6y ago> Reading this made me realized how cheap Internal data is in Viet Nam. same here in Chennai, India. I'm currently paying 15USD including tax for a 200MBPS connection with 3.3TB FUP. I have never reached my FUP limit. provider is ACT fibernet and they are good in the business.
- thangngoc89 6y agoWow. That’s a fast connection (Also are you sure it’s a 200MBPS and not 200Mbps?). Something like that would cost around 100USD and only available for businesses.
- shripadk 6y agoI am sure it is Mbps not MBPS. Same here with Jio Fiber [1]. Get 100 Mbps with 400GB data per month at at 699₹ (approx 10$) per month. [1]: https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI love how we let ISPs get away with advertising speeds to consumers in bits per second when all data, like file size, is displayed to those consumers in bytes. Everyone basically thinks their speed is 8x faster than it is. I am still regularly fooled by it.
- jwandborg 6y agoNetwork interface speeds are usually specified in Mbits, so it's not just the ISPs.
- emsy 6y agoPinterest is one of the worst sites on the internet and I will cherish the day it vanishes from Google image search results which will hopefully kill it off, leaving space for a superior competitor (one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login). The same applies to Quora.
- dawnerd 6y agoWe need another panda update.
- dsnr 6y ago> one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login Recently Medium started to do the same thing. Google should start penalizing such results.
- TedShiller 6y agoI always take screenshots of Pinterest images. They want to make it hard to save the pinterest image that you see on google search results. They want you to sign up. Haha. Well I guess they haven’t heard of screenshots before.
- afandian 6y agoIrony being that wirthout the clickthrough and attribution, Pinterest is essentially a copyright pirating site.
- ackbar03 6y agoI've been wondering about that actually. How do they get away with it when they are essentially just profitting off of other people's images
- joshspankit 6y agoBecause they “are just the platform”, and the early days was all about “make your own boards for your own purposes”. Once they had enough users they quickly transitioned to what we see now: game Google search results and force people to sign up.
- uncledave 6y agoAnother cancerous behaviour of Pinterest. There’s a surprise. This is the one of the nastiest pieces of software there is when combined with search engines. They should block it from being indexed.
- riggsdk 6y agoGoogle has really turned "bad" over the last years. Whenever I search for anything I immediately get thrown a ton of shopping websites in my face as if my default mindset is "buy more crap". Google has more and more turned into "where to buy" instead of "where to find information". Searching for information on "Vienna"? Here are 200+ hotels you can book! It's like a game how to formulate your queries to avoid the most annoying results. Pinterest is a cancer in the Google search results. I hate having to surgically add 10 different pinterest exclusion terms (from various countries) to my search query. I wonder when a hybrid "wikipedia-of-search" solution arises. I'm envisioning distributed clusters of specialized indexes for various topics. For example some enthusiasts crawl and curate tonnes of cooking websites, others technical and what have you not. Anyone with somewhat beefy servers can then make a search engine by subscribing to these indexes (bittorrent-like manner?) and pick and choose what they want included. A whole ecosystem of information indexing would pop up and we'd see blocklists (AdBlock of search) and craplists. I'm sure Pinterest would end up on one or two of those lists.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- technick 6y agoI recommend putting in a pihole on your network and dns blackhole everything going to pinterest. A pihole will verify if pinterest is a valid problem or not. Otherwise, maybe you can run network analysis tools on your router?
- BelenusMordred 6y agoWhile I agree pihole is a great tool, if someone is trying to simply block pinterest it's one line in your hosts file on Windows, Mac and Linux. Any loss of functionality would be immediately noticeable.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoDoesn't help with GSM data tho. :) Now if there was a hosts file on iOS that I could edit...
- 247hustler 6y agoI tried using Pinterest, I lasted 1 day
- Jarolis 6y agoHuh, interesting that he got such a breakdown from his ISP. I wonder how difficult it is to get that data without his kind of circumstance. Can I ask my ISP for it? Would they bother?
- the_arun 6y agoIf there is a way to log this at router level, then we already have it. No need to talk to ISP.
- undreren 6y agoThat might depend on your country of residence, but in Europe we have the right to all non-confidential data associated with us from any company that isn't "prohibitively expensive" to obtain, such as "all video footage with me in it from 2010 to today". In this case though, it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive to obtain, as it forms the foundation for tracking the use of your data plan. If it was prohibitively expensive to obtain, they wouldn't be able to tell you, when you hit your data cap.
- rukshn 6y agoWell after I tweeted they contacted me via Twitter DM and had a conversation with email, the email I have provided them, and they emailed me the breakdown, it’s a very long list of sites and protocols and data used I have cropped the first few results only to show what’s relevant
- Ekaros 6y agoAnyone else thought that they would be annoyed if the ISP was able to tell me this data? I don't want them tracking which services I communicate with... Maybe I should start self-hosted VPN if I actually cared...
- hmottestad 6y agoYou are using your ISP to contact those websites. Even with encryption you would still need to tell your isp which ip you want to connect to. Tor is your friend if you care about hiding this kind of info.
- yandie 6y agoThat's what a VPN is for. Your ISP can't see the destination up addresses and only see your connection to the VPN endpoint
- hmottestad 6y agoSo you trust your VPN more than your ISP? They can just log the exact same data! And probably do with it as they please...
- toper-centage 6y agoVirtually all ISPs collect and sell this data.
- tobyhinloopen 6y ago[citation needed]
- krageon 6y agoThey use network traffic information to figure out who needs to be peered with. This is like asking citation for someone that says gas-burning cars need gas stops to refuel. It's just not reasonable.
- mattowen_uk 6y agoInteresting article, but has anyone actually analysed the traffic properly to see what's going on, or confirmed this guys findings?
- rukshn 6y agoThat’s what I’m going to do starting from this month, like I said this is from my ISP who sent me the breakdown, a 2 page pdf with protocols and sites with data I sent and received Like I said it maybe a measuring error, or flat out lie by the ISP, but I can check once I monitored and blocked Pinterest for a month
- cft 6y agoPinterest has been declining for 5 years: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0h3tm0f,tiktok https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... MAUs they report are drive-by temporary users (rather than engaged real users, like LinkedIn of Facebook), that get funneled to Pinterest by Google Image Search. Here is some background: Recently, it has been revealed that Pinterest reverse-image searches Google for uploaded images and adds the Google query result to the Pinterest image page for SEO: https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-hack https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-... This degrades quality of Google image search, for example this Reddit post on removing Pinterest got 77k upvotes: Reddit r/LifeProTips to remove Pinterest from Google searches: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_when_using_google_add_pinterest_sans_quotes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe... Earlier Reddit petition to Google to remove Pinterest from search results (66k upvotes): https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/85atho/pinterest_needs_to_be_removed_from_google_imo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/85atho/pinterest_ne... Hacker News discussion of Pinterest's Google scraping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701998 A very recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586 Earlier discussion on HackerNews (1.1k upvotes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996 "Unpinterested" Chrome extension to combat Pinterest spam (10k+ downloads): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefaihkenmchjmcpcbpdijpoknfjpbfe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...
- diveanon 6y agoAny theories on why google continues to allow them to degrade their search results?
- prionassembly 6y agoThat doesn't look like a very steep decline.
- markdown 6y agoIf you ask your ISP for a breakdown of your data, it's very likely they'll give you a sanitised account. Are you sure they've simply aggregated data usage from porn sites under the pinterest label?
- jnsaff2 6y agoWhat would be a great alternative to pinterest? Asking for a friend.
- wastholm 6y agoRelated question: what is Pinterest for, exactly? As in, why does it exist? I created an account there long ago when the site was new and tried to figure out what problem it was supposed to solve but failed. I remember trying for a short while to use it to collect news clippings on different subjects but that was really frustrating so that can't be it. Wikipedia says it's for "image sharing [...] in the form of pinboards", that it's "a catalogue for ideas" and that it "inspires users to 'go out and do that thing'". What does that even mean?
- DanBC 6y agoIt's visual bookmarking, but your bookmarks are public so other people can see them and save them to their own bookmarks. You can set up a board for a topic. "Tattoos I want", "ceramic mugs", "wedding locations", "cutlery" or whatever. Then you install the Pinterest browser button. Then, when you search the web for these things and you find them you save an image to your board. Or you can search Pinterest itself for these things and save the links to your boards. Later, when you go to your board you have all these images in one place so you can easily compare them. Of course some people find this cumbersome and limiting and prefer to usebrowser tabs and bookmarks and folders, and that's fine if it works for them.
- dobladov 6y agohttp://are.na/ http://are.na/ could be an alternative
- johnofthesea 6y agoThis is probably not the right answer and obviously irrelevant if you want to share things but, at least in MacOS, you can actually tag your files in Finder.
- oefrha 6y agoOther than the tired old "Pinterest bad" which is obvious to everyone, this post is pretty confusing. The author can surely let us know how they're using Pinterest? Because if you just do some search on Google Images, then however many results you load and however many of those results are from Pinterest, you're not gonna connect to Pinterest at all, as all images are proxied through gstatic.com. You have to actually visit a Pinterest property to make a connection. (Edit: or some other site that pulls in Pinterest resources. If that site has caused you to unwittingly download 1.2GB of data in 17 connections from Pinterest, you should also complain about that site, and that complaint would likely be more interesting.) I just tried visiting some pages on Pinterest (from Google Images results for "cat pinterest", "dog pinterest", etc.). I scrolled all the way down until I'm not allowed to scroll anymore (until I create an account?). Each time it's around 7MB data transferred. Assuming one connection per visit, that's still nowhere near 1GB in 17 connections. So, maybe you have a Pinterest app installed that's doing stuff in the background? Or maybe you visit Pinterest signed in and can scroll indefinitely, loading thousands upon thousands of images? Or maybe you're infested by some malware that's secretly connecting to Pinterest for god knows what reason? In any case, I don't think you're gonna lose data to Pinterest if you're only seeing some Pinterest results on Google properties.
- rukshn 6y agoHi op here, not a regular Pinterest user, I may land on their website when I’m looking for an image on Pinterest. I’m not an avid daily Pinterest user, neither I have Pinterest on my mobile phone This is sent to me by my ISP, I know it does not make sense and I don’t understand it either, what I know is that something is wrong somewhere
- joshspankit 6y agoIf you’re curious enough, please follow up with this after installing some bandwidth-tracking tools on your home network. It would also benefit you in future as you’d know immediately when something is eating up data.
- bmcn2020 6y agoIs this for mobile data, or are we talking about his home internet?
- netsharc 6y agoIt's a sucky post. I thought "save your data" meant keeping my personal information secure, but no, it means saving his data quota.
- pindab0ter 6y agoA post isn’t sucky just because your definition and their definition of a term which are both valid don’t align with your expectations.
- netsharc 6y agoYet as I see now the title in HN has been changed...
- diveanon 6y agoWhat are the odds that google acquires pinterest and just replaces image search with it? Seem's like exactly the kind of user hostile bullshit that google would do these days.
- rukshn 6y agoPinterest acquired Jelly to build their current onsite search solution
- oytis 6y agoWhat is the legitimate use case for Pinterest by the way? I was always regarding it as one of those websites spamming Google searches.
- code_duck 6y agoFor people to create visual collections of items from anywhere on the internet. They could be used for shopping, inspiration, bookmarks, or many other purposes. I developed a similar site before Pinterest launched. Etsy used to have a feature called the Treasury, where members made collections of items, typically based on a theme like color, purpose, theme or aesthetic. Around the same time (2008-2009) there were sites like Wists, Wishlist or the Amazon wishlist bookmarklet. I had an etsy-related startup at the time. We decided we wanted to make a collection site that was like the Treasury but drew from anywhere on the internet. I created a bookmarklet similar to Amazon's that would pop up, let you select a photo and a title and add any URL to one of your lists on our site. We had it 80% functional and styled, but became distracted by our primary project and unfortunately never launched it.
- oytis 6y agoNow I think I understand. So it might be convenient for visually (as opposed to textually) oriented people. For me it's just pictures, pictures everywhere, but I can imagine other people's brains might work differently.
- KineticLensman 6y agoOne use case is photographers / models /studios creating mood boards for a photoshoot. E.g. A studio owner might for example post a bunch of images that illustrate the type of 'look' that they are offering to photographers in terms of the lighting, outfits, make-up artist capability, etc.
- code_duck 6y agoYes, this style of list making is most useful for visually oriented fields and people. The focus on having a little bit of text and links on the images makes the concept more than an image gallery. Shopping, art, food are all broad areas in which people share and publish appealing photographs, and they're also ripe for socialization.
- jerome-jh 6y agoJust thinking aloud. 1GB in 17 connections: most likely that would be videos. Could it be videos embedded in other websites? If I go to pinterest I see the images being downloaded from pinimg.com domain.
- mobilio 6y agoDisable Background App Refresh!
- captn3m0 6y ago>Bought a zoom package and data add-on today because I need zoom to work So the ISP does have cheaper bandwidth available, but only if you pay them more. This is _exactly_ why we need Net Neutrality - instead of having to figure out whether we should block Pinterest.
- kelchqvjpnfasjl 6y agoI found that data plans that Sri Lanka Telecom offers here[0] with the "zoom package" that he was referring to here[1]. The "zoom package" that he mentioned doesn't seem to be any faster, it just adds additional data to the cap for Microsoft Teams/Zoom/Skype/etc. Their standard plans have also separate data caps for regular and off peak hours. Remember how cell phone plans used to be metered by the minute for talk and you had a different allocation for nights and weekends. Now even cheap prepaid plans in the US offer unlimited talk. When Sri Lankan infrastructure improves and their economy grows plans like this will be a thing of the past. [0] https://slt.lk/en/broadband/packages https://slt.lk/en/broadband/packages [1] https://slt.lk/en/broadband/data-addons/meet https://slt.lk/en/broadband/data-addons/meet
- marcinzm 6y agoIt may be cheaper because Zoom subsidizes the cost in which case net neutrality would increase the cost to the end user.
- anoncake 6y agoMaybe in the short term. In the long term, not having net neutrality here reduces competition by giving Zoom an additional artificial advantage over its less entrenched competition.
- marcinzm 6y agoNet Neutrality is good for society however that wasn't the argument of the person I replied to. I'm merely pointing out that lower telecom prices isn't a consequence of net neutrality.
- lxgr 6y ago> The ISP was kind enough to reach out to me and I received an email detailing the data use of my internet connection. Is it just me, or does this level of data collection seem pretty concerning for an ISP? I'm aware that there are legal requirements for this type of data collection for law enforcement use, but sharing it with customers seems strange. Besides that, these groupings seem strange. Why are applications/services, application and encryption protocols mixed here? With that level of granularity, "Pinterest" might easily be misclassified traffic of any other service sharing Pinterest's CDN.
- jasonjayr 6y ago> Is it just me, or does this level of data collection seem pretty concerning for an ISP? I'm aware that there are legal requirements for this type of data collection for law enforcement use, but sharing it with customers seems strange. ISP's have been been doing this for eons, not just for law enforcement, but for marketing as well. To be honest, I think it's refreshing that they are willing to share the data they have about the customer with the customer. I think if more providers did that it would be eye opening to end users what's going on behind the scenes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- YuccaGloriosa 6y agoTop answer is.... Corruption
- prionassembly 6y agoPinterest is notedly toxic to the web in general, but it provides an unparalleled UX to image discovery. (E.g. I'm into asemic writing and certain kinds of typographical/typewriter art mixed with musical notation) What's an alternative?
- Theodores 6y agoJust search for 'asemic calligraphy' on Instagram on your phone. You can scroll happily ever after.= leaving the web as you knew it far behind.
- bertman 6y agoCouldn't help but notice that a "share this on pinterest" button below the author's pinterest rant is pretty ironic.
- Ayesh 6y agoFellow Sri Lankan here, although I don't live there anymore. Dialog and SLT both seem to have some hair pulling stats with their data usage, and I wouldn't even trust them for the statistics. It is possible that they associate IP ranges with the service name, and it's probably outdated information. It also shows TLS 1.3 and Pinterest in the same table, so that report is useless as no report.