9 ms·

No Instagram, no privacy

128 points by wouterjanl 1y ago

ruined 1y ago
meta and its social networks have been a disaster for the human race
- chelmzy 1y ago
  It's radicalizing as a twenty something who hasn't had social media in over a decade. Almost everything revolves around it or some friend Discord server. I hate it.
  - asdff 1y ago
    Don't worry by late 20s all that will quiet down in your friend group as people "adult" themselves into their boring 30 year old years. Tale as old as time.
- alex1138 1y ago
  They needed to have proper defaults and they needed to let their social network grow organically and they needed to have an actual sane, proper, feed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 There's a reason everyone is on Facebook (one reason is that everyone is on Facebook): Myspace legitimately shot themselves in the foot (I guess Friendster too by lack of proper site performance, even though it was cleaner) by having 'messy' pages. There's real value in being able to find the people you want/need to find by their real names (except, Google, maybe don't you know, hijack people's Youtube accounts in order so that they use Google+) But then Facebook introduces shifting privacy settings, tagging without permission, not giving people control over how information is displayed generally I understand it's about beating the competition and about growing and 'connecting the world' but some companies' DNA is set a certain way from the beginning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
strathmeyer 1y ago
Does anyone want to socialize but not have to socialize? I know I sure do / don't.
igor47 1y ago
i've thought the same thing about email. i run my own email server, so i'm one of a very few number of people whose email is opaque to gmail. on the other hand -- almost everyone i exchange email with uses gmail, so actually gmail has almost all my email anyway.
- 2Gkashmiri 1y ago
  I bought into mailinabox like 3-4 years ago. Zero issues since then. First time my emails got into spam but after unspamming, it worked. Havent had issues. I use a cheap racknerd $12/year server so its way cheaper than proton or stuff and I have dozens of emails across family members.
- AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
  Did you have any problems with Gmail not trusting your server and moving your letters to spam?
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Don't immediately start hosting your own email on a brand new domain especially if you're using a free or very low-cost VPS provider. Pay a bit more for a better reputation provider. Use a domain you've owned for a while. Set up all SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly. Or just pay fastmail to do it for you.
    - chrisweekly 1y ago
      Strong rec to use Fastmail; it's a fantastic, reliable, inexpensive service w/ excellent performance and UX.
    - 2Gkashmiri 1y ago
      I disagree. I followed luke smiths video on email hosting and adapted to miab and I was up and running. Checked the IP for problems beforehand. Have had to request a different IP once.
    - ddoolin 1y ago
paxys 1y ago
"I went on a weekend trip and didn't invite friend A, so I hope friend B keeps it a secret and doesn't tell anyone I was there" is the kind of social dynamic that people grow out of in high school. If you are having trouble with it as an adult then it isn't really Instagram's fault. People talk to each other and share stuff, and sometimes they talk about you, both online and offline. Just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people. They are adults as well, and care about it less than you think.
- alwa 1y ago
  There’s value in grace. For all sorts of reasons you might be right to do things that make other people feel bad. That’s no reason to rub their nose in it. What’s the virtue in offending people when you could instead be kind? I know one woman who is having a baby shower, and I know another woman who recently dealt with the loss of her child. It’s not “secrecy” to celebrate the baby shower and avoid bringing it up with the recently bereaved, it’s respect and good taste. I feel like we used to call it discretion…
  - popularrecluse 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - rootnod3 1y ago
    The people being offended could just act like an adult. If you want to go out with friend A but don't want friend B to see it for whatever reason (maybe B has a feud with A), then that is a thing between B and A, but not you. I think the whole point of the OP comment is to just go with it. If you don't flauntingly advertise it, it is not your fault. But in a very social media centric world, even if you are just a participant in a picture can feel like "flaunting it" to 3rd parties.
    - 1y ago
elAhmo 1y ago
It is perfectly valid and fine thing to say to someone, as an adult, that you don't want to be a part of their stories on social media. If they don't respect that, you need a new set of friends.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
firefoxd 1y ago
The social etiquette argument has been thrown away with the bath water. You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok. The term I like is Social Cooling, the subtle way in which people change their behavior because they are both present in person and online. Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.
- alwa 1y ago
  Have you had that experience, of being taken as a weirdo? We may move in very different circles, but when I ask to be left out of social media posts I’m always met with respect and understanding, at least to my face. If anything, in recent years, I’m met with something closer to the respect people afford recovering addicts turning down drinks: “oh man, I wish I were off of it too, good for you.”
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- soupfordummies 1y ago
  Be the change you wanna see... A lot of people thought non-drinkers were kinda weird a decade or so ago when drinking wine on morning TV was popular. Now half of the beer aisle is N/A offerings.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  > You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok. Definitely _not_ a universal feeling.
- jjulius 1y ago
  >You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok. You might call me a "weirdo", but this has absolutely not been my experience whatsoever. Friends, family and coworkers don't really give a shit that I don't participate in social media, and I haven't been treated any differently for it. Edit: And hell, generally, what's life without a bit of weird? The homogeneity of everyone doing the same thing together all the time sounds boring as hell. Here's to the weirdos!
netsharc 1y ago
> Imagine a friend you were on a weekend trip with. This friend talks with another common friend. This common friend could have equally well been on that weekend trip because you like him or her but, due to circumstances, as is life, you did not invite him. You probably would feel uncomfortable with that first friend talking about that trip as if it was the most awesome trip ever, that everyone had non-stop fun and now everyone who was on that trip are best friends for life. I feel like this is an issue one just has to grow up past. Walking on eggshells and deception so as not to hurt anyone's feelings is an annoying way to live. (I preach as a sinner). Related: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-friend-benefits https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-frie... As to Zuck's machine having your information, yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts, it can also determine what the friend groups of this person are. Probably even determine their wealth by their clothes, accessories, vacation locations, house ("Oh 5 users are gathered in a particular geolocation that is none of their houses [which we know about because 95% of the time a phone returns to a particular geolocation at night], and we can see from the photos that that 'unregistered user' is with them", that must be this user's house. Oh he lives in this neighborhood, that has a median income of EUR xyz. A reverse lookup of addresses we have because online shops upload their customer data to our system determines that one of the people living in that address is named Wouter Janleys, and from the shopping data he likes, amongst other things, mid-range to expensive wines.". I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, that'd be a feature improvement for a Facebook project manager. Start showing your friends wine ads a few weeks before your birthday (as well as "It's Wouter's birthday in a few weeks" and "Remember this photo?" which is a photo of the group with glasses of wine)...
- mhitza 1y ago
  > I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, Probably did so through shadow profiles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
  > yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts This is a thing in FB: shadow accounts. A lot of time and money and research goes into it, so that if/when people do decide to join, they will have a very "familiar" experience with all the right suggestions ready to go. Yes, it's creepy as hell. No, you can't opt out as far as I know.
johnklos 1y ago
People who know me know that even though I'm very public (my handle and my email address are my name, for instance), I care about privacy, and therefore it's unacceptable to post abount me on corporate social media without asking permission, just as they also know to not name or tag me. People who post without asking don't know me well enough to name or tag me, so I don't care. If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it. We need to stop acting like others' ignorance gives them an excuse to do things we don't want. "But everyone does it" is bull, and we're doing people a disservice when we let things slide because of that.
- JCattheATM 1y ago
  > If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it. Ultimately you can't stop this though, at all. You say people who don't know you don't tag you, but it just takes a friend of a friend in a group to do so, and then dismiss your concerns and not care, and you have no recourse to do anything.
mjevans 1y ago
Should it be allowed / legal to 'tag' people that are not part of a service? I might agree that 'celebrities' and leaders of larger organizations are 'public figures' and thus if there's a reasonable public interest it should be allowed to tag them, probably with a publishing delay for security. However individuals? Random citizens who aren't part of a platform and cannot manage their data? IMO the default should be deny data collection and do not profile.
- simiones 1y ago
  I don't think the problem raised in the article is limited to tagging. Friend A can recognize me in a picture from friend B regardless of whether I'm tagged there or not. Then again, this is a pretty obscure problem, or more of a "problem".
  - abirch 1y ago
    Something that is scary is Clearview AI, etc. Then you don't need a person to recognize you, AI can do it. Add in Meta Rayban and it'll be harder and harder to maintain any shred of privacy.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  What happens if you don't have an Instagram account, write to them and demand that they take down images of you, or provide you with all the images you appear in? Some level of this seems to be provided for by the GDPR and the EUs right to be forgotten.
- bobismyuncle 1y ago
  Tagging will be redundant pretty soon with facial recognition...
steveBK123 1y ago
One of my "its probably time to quit IG" moments prior to quitting 3 years involved being on a condo board. A resident sent a petition asking for a variance from the bylaws, and part of the pitch was "well I saw XYZ on your IG so I thought you'd approve of this". Uhh thanks, rejected.. blocked on IG, quit IG, bye.
- immibis 1y ago
  That's just normal politics though? If you publicize that you have an interest in X, and you're on the board, and someone wants X from the board, isn't it normal they'd approach you first? Were you trying to require them to use a more formal process? The smaller the number of people involved, the less formal the processes yet (no matter how much bureaucracy you try to drown them in - in a small political system, drowning someone in bureaucracy is just a rude way of saying no).
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    It was a third appeal to violate some building bylaws so they could make modification for personal use and exclusive benefit of communal property. They thought I just might like what they were doing and approve it the third time lol. edit to add more context: On condo boards you deal with a lot of self interested strong willed people who have unreasonable demands & complaints like - "why can't I just put a 1000 gallon hot tub on the roof above my neighbors bedroom without approval.. why do I need legal & architect review .. why do I have to pay for that review.. ". And on denial "hey I saw on your IG you went to an onsen once so I thought you'd like this idea!" If you wanna do wtf you want, get a house with a large lot away from neighbors. If you want to share walls/floors/ceilings with other people, get used to their being some requirements for common sense and decency.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Did the first denial say "no, now go away" or did it say "no, because water is much heavier than most people think and it will collapse the roof, so you need an engineering report"?
standardUser 1y ago
[flagged]
timcobb 1y ago
This reminded me of the time ~10 years ago I was at an event featuring Richard Stallman, and he started by say that no one was allowed to post photos of him on FB. This was to a room of hundreds of people, mostly hackers. I thought, "damn, if there's an uphill battle somewhere, this guy will find it!"
- procaryote 1y ago
  You allowed to have boundaries even if there's a few assholes who won't respect them
  - accrual 1y ago
    In this example RMS made a request to the audience. A boundary would be something like "if you post photos of me to Facebook, you won't be invited to my conferences" or "if you do X, I won't interact with you". Might be difficult to enforce, but that's on the person making the boundary.
    - reverendsteveii 1y ago
      That's the defining feature of a boundary: you don't actually tell people what to do. You just tell them what you'll do. "Don't talk to me like that" is an ask, "Talk to me like that again and I'll leave" is a boundary.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- lostmsu 1y ago
  In US, if that was a private event, his request is legally binding.
  - bobismyuncle 1y ago
    How would this work in practice if it was litigated? Wouldn't you need proof that this was expressly communicated to the specific individual that violated and that they did so knowingly? Seems like it probably isn't enforceable...
sannysanoff 1y ago
[flagged]
mvdtnz 1y ago
He wants to hang out with friends, but he wants his friends to never speak of it with their other friends?
zombitack 1y ago
After being friends with public people, I got in the habit of asking people in pictures before I post, regardless of if they're on Instagram or not. And I NEVER post kid pictures. I find these rules should be obvious to most people. I'll even ask my wife first, who is always just about to post the same set of pictures I am. It's the decent thing to do.
- noman-land 1y ago
  How often do you get a no?
  - hoherd 1y ago
    I take personal pride in how many of my friends have online avatars that are candid portraits that I took of them while we were out doing whatever, and I have had numerous people contact me and ask me to remove all of their photos. In the past sometimes it was "replace my name in the tags with a pseudonym" but now it's "remove them all." This all happened before AI took over, so you can imagine how relieved many of those people are in the age of deepfakes. Candid portraits are my favorite kind of photo to take, but sadly in the modern age, I've chosen to take down almost all of my portraits. I still have a self-hosted photo sharing software set up that I personally use to look through my collection and can share past memories with people, including lots of portraits I would have previously posted online, but I think most people and I have our guard up against AI crawlers. AI crawlers have made the web much more hostile than it was in the past.
  - elric 1y ago
    Not the original commenter, but my friends are aware of my picture preferences (as in: get that camera out of my face). I always say "no", and most people I know are fine with that. There are (or so I've been informed) some pictures of me on Facebook and Instagram. I don't have an account on either website so I can't see those pictures or even request to have them removed. Those were posted by the kind of older relatives who are impossible to educate on anything technology- (or consent-) related, and occasionally by friends-of-friends who snapped a pic while I was unawares. Whenever I take a picture of anyone, I always ask first, and I never post them anywhere public. Feels like common decency to me, but there is obviously no such thing as universal common decency, so YMMV.
panstromek 1y ago
A think this is partly why a lot of this activity moved into private group chats, where it's more naturally segregated by social circles. Most people around me are pretty active on social media but vast majority of that activity is not in the public profile.
imaginationra 1y ago
[flagged]
- wouterjanl 1y ago
  I don’t understand, what kind of marketing do you think this is? I’m OP. I setup the blog a while ago but only for the first time I thought of something that was actually worth writing about. Something needs to be the first post! I’m sorry you found it boring.
cess11 1y ago
I expect people to ask me before they publish documentation of where I've been and what I did on services like Instagram, and I usually decline the offer. Is this considered unreasonable elsewhere?
wormius 1y ago
This sounds like it should be an AITA post on reddit based on the comments in this thread.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nalekberov 1y ago
I'm visiting Instagram lately only to see funny reels sent from my friends. My Instagram timeline is consisting of 90% influencers and life coaches, who is going to tell me my life sucks because I don't do what they have to tell me to do and 10% my friends.
Funes- 1y ago
This bothered me a lot in the past. I want to be in full control of any information that is on the Internet concerning myself. Some of the people I know will add an appeasing comment before taking a picture: "don't worry, I won't upload it anywhere!", but most people will just post it willy-nilly all the same. By the way, during last Monday's blackout in Spain, I had a sense of this kind of burden being lifted from the atmosphere... the idea of nobody having the ability to record and publish anything anymore (for the duration of the blackout, at least), was quite interesting... relieving, even.
alistairSH 1y ago
Approaching zero of my friends are on Meta any more. Most have inactive accounts; a few have canceled outright. Those that are “active” are mostly limited to wishing each other happy birthday. Afaic, Meta pretty much killed their platforms by pumping rage-bait clicks instead of social content.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  Exactly my experience as someone in the ostensible target demographic, late twenties to mid forties social circle. Granted I'm German with most friends/family in central/Eastern Europe so a bit less Instagram obsessed than the Anglosphere but so much has moved to Whatsapp (technically Meta I guess, but not really a public facing social network), Signal, Telegram. And from what I see working with younger people out of uni, it's almost all private group chats, Discord, only real social platform seems to be TikTok. If there wasn't a date on the blog post I'd have guessed it was from 2017 or something, because the problem just feels obsolete now. Didn't Zuckerberg himself even say something to that effect?
- asdff 1y ago
  No one is active on social media anymore like they were in college or high school. People just age out or get too busy for that kind of stuff. They might lurk but posts are pretty rare for most people who would have been posting 3 times a day 15 years ago. I'm not sure if the younger generation is actually active anymore or if they also just lurk now. Dead internet theory and all...
raccoonhands 1y ago
if you're a passive person, there are most likely more famous people for them to judge and make fun of if that's what you're worried about who tarnish their images online every day! i look at posts like these like sharing a photo album with friends

128 points by wouterjanl 1y ago

ruined 1y ago

meta and its social networks have been a disaster for the human race

chelmzy 1y ago
It's radicalizing as a twenty something who hasn't had social media in over a decade. Almost everything revolves around it or some friend Discord server. I hate it.
- asdff 1y ago
  Don't worry by late 20s all that will quiet down in your friend group as people "adult" themselves into their boring 30 year old years. Tale as old as time.
alex1138 1y ago
They needed to have proper defaults and they needed to let their social network grow organically and they needed to have an actual sane, proper, feed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 There's a reason everyone is on Facebook (one reason is that everyone is on Facebook): Myspace legitimately shot themselves in the foot (I guess Friendster too by lack of proper site performance, even though it was cleaner) by having 'messy' pages. There's real value in being able to find the people you want/need to find by their real names (except, Google, maybe don't you know, hijack people's Youtube accounts in order so that they use Google+) But then Facebook introduces shifting privacy settings, tagging without permission, not giving people control over how information is displayed generally I understand it's about beating the competition and about growing and 'connecting the world' but some companies' DNA is set a certain way from the beginning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

strathmeyer 1y ago

Does anyone want to socialize but not have to socialize? I know I sure do / don't.

igor47 1y ago

i've thought the same thing about email. i run my own email server, so i'm one of a very few number of people whose email is opaque to gmail. on the other hand -- almost everyone i exchange email with uses gmail, so actually gmail has almost all my email anyway.

2Gkashmiri 1y ago
I bought into mailinabox like 3-4 years ago. Zero issues since then. First time my emails got into spam but after unspamming, it worked. Havent had issues. I use a cheap racknerd $12/year server so its way cheaper than proton or stuff and I have dozens of emails across family members.
AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
Did you have any problems with Gmail not trusting your server and moving your letters to spam?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Don't immediately start hosting your own email on a brand new domain especially if you're using a free or very low-cost VPS provider. Pay a bit more for a better reputation provider. Use a domain you've owned for a while. Set up all SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly. Or just pay fastmail to do it for you.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    Strong rec to use Fastmail; it's a fantastic, reliable, inexpensive service w/ excellent performance and UX.
  - 2Gkashmiri 1y ago
    I disagree. I followed luke smiths video on email hosting and adapted to miab and I was up and running. Checked the IP for problems beforehand. Have had to request a different IP once.
  - ddoolin 1y ago

paxys 1y ago

"I went on a weekend trip and didn't invite friend A, so I hope friend B keeps it a secret and doesn't tell anyone I was there" is the kind of social dynamic that people grow out of in high school. If you are having trouble with it as an adult then it isn't really Instagram's fault. People talk to each other and share stuff, and sometimes they talk about you, both online and offline. Just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people. They are adults as well, and care about it less than you think.

alwa 1y ago
There’s value in grace. For all sorts of reasons you might be right to do things that make other people feel bad. That’s no reason to rub their nose in it. What’s the virtue in offending people when you could instead be kind? I know one woman who is having a baby shower, and I know another woman who recently dealt with the loss of her child. It’s not “secrecy” to celebrate the baby shower and avoid bringing it up with the recently bereaved, it’s respect and good taste. I feel like we used to call it discretion…
- popularrecluse 1y ago
  [flagged]
- lostmsu 1y ago
  [flagged]
- rootnod3 1y ago
  The people being offended could just act like an adult. If you want to go out with friend A but don't want friend B to see it for whatever reason (maybe B has a feud with A), then that is a thing between B and A, but not you. I think the whole point of the OP comment is to just go with it. If you don't flauntingly advertise it, it is not your fault. But in a very social media centric world, even if you are just a participant in a picture can feel like "flaunting it" to 3rd parties.
  - 1y ago

elAhmo 1y ago

It is perfectly valid and fine thing to say to someone, as an adult, that you don't want to be a part of their stories on social media. If they don't respect that, you need a new set of friends.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

firefoxd 1y ago

The social etiquette argument has been thrown away with the bath water. You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok. The term I like is Social Cooling, the subtle way in which people change their behavior because they are both present in person and online. Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.

alwa 1y ago
Have you had that experience, of being taken as a weirdo? We may move in very different circles, but when I ask to be left out of social media posts I’m always met with respect and understanding, at least to my face. If anything, in recent years, I’m met with something closer to the respect people afford recovering addicts turning down drinks: “oh man, I wish I were off of it too, good for you.”
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
soupfordummies 1y ago
Be the change you wanna see... A lot of people thought non-drinkers were kinda weird a decade or so ago when drinking wine on morning TV was popular. Now half of the beer aisle is N/A offerings.
barbazoo 1y ago
> You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok. Definitely _not_ a universal feeling.
jjulius 1y ago
>You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok. You might call me a "weirdo", but this has absolutely not been my experience whatsoever. Friends, family and coworkers don't really give a shit that I don't participate in social media, and I haven't been treated any differently for it. Edit: And hell, generally, what's life without a bit of weird? The homogeneity of everyone doing the same thing together all the time sounds boring as hell. Here's to the weirdos!

netsharc 1y ago

> Imagine a friend you were on a weekend trip with. This friend talks with another common friend. This common friend could have equally well been on that weekend trip because you like him or her but, due to circumstances, as is life, you did not invite him. You probably would feel uncomfortable with that first friend talking about that trip as if it was the most awesome trip ever, that everyone had non-stop fun and now everyone who was on that trip are best friends for life. I feel like this is an issue one just has to grow up past. Walking on eggshells and deception so as not to hurt anyone's feelings is an annoying way to live. (I preach as a sinner). Related: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-friend-benefits https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-frie... As to Zuck's machine having your information, yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts, it can also determine what the friend groups of this person are. Probably even determine their wealth by their clothes, accessories, vacation locations, house ("Oh 5 users are gathered in a particular geolocation that is none of their houses [which we know about because 95% of the time a phone returns to a particular geolocation at night], and we can see from the photos that that 'unregistered user' is with them", that must be this user's house. Oh he lives in this neighborhood, that has a median income of EUR xyz. A reverse lookup of addresses we have because online shops upload their customer data to our system determines that one of the people living in that address is named Wouter Janleys, and from the shopping data he likes, amongst other things, mid-range to expensive wines.". I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, that'd be a feature improvement for a Facebook project manager. Start showing your friends wine ads a few weeks before your birthday (as well as "It's Wouter's birthday in a few weeks" and "Remember this photo?" which is a photo of the group with glasses of wine)...

mhitza 1y ago
> I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, Probably did so through shadow profiles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
> yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts This is a thing in FB: shadow accounts. A lot of time and money and research goes into it, so that if/when people do decide to join, they will have a very "familiar" experience with all the right suggestions ready to go. Yes, it's creepy as hell. No, you can't opt out as far as I know.

johnklos 1y ago

People who know me know that even though I'm very public (my handle and my email address are my name, for instance), I care about privacy, and therefore it's unacceptable to post abount me on corporate social media without asking permission, just as they also know to not name or tag me. People who post without asking don't know me well enough to name or tag me, so I don't care. If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it. We need to stop acting like others' ignorance gives them an excuse to do things we don't want. "But everyone does it" is bull, and we're doing people a disservice when we let things slide because of that.

JCattheATM 1y ago
> If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it. Ultimately you can't stop this though, at all. You say people who don't know you don't tag you, but it just takes a friend of a friend in a group to do so, and then dismiss your concerns and not care, and you have no recourse to do anything.

mjevans 1y ago

Should it be allowed / legal to 'tag' people that are not part of a service? I might agree that 'celebrities' and leaders of larger organizations are 'public figures' and thus if there's a reasonable public interest it should be allowed to tag them, probably with a publishing delay for security. However individuals? Random citizens who aren't part of a platform and cannot manage their data? IMO the default should be deny data collection and do not profile.

simiones 1y ago
I don't think the problem raised in the article is limited to tagging. Friend A can recognize me in a picture from friend B regardless of whether I'm tagged there or not. Then again, this is a pretty obscure problem, or more of a "problem".
- abirch 1y ago
  Something that is scary is Clearview AI, etc. Then you don't need a person to recognize you, AI can do it. Add in Meta Rayban and it'll be harder and harder to maintain any shred of privacy.
mrweasel 1y ago
What happens if you don't have an Instagram account, write to them and demand that they take down images of you, or provide you with all the images you appear in? Some level of this seems to be provided for by the GDPR and the EUs right to be forgotten.
bobismyuncle 1y ago
Tagging will be redundant pretty soon with facial recognition...

steveBK123 1y ago

One of my "its probably time to quit IG" moments prior to quitting 3 years involved being on a condo board. A resident sent a petition asking for a variance from the bylaws, and part of the pitch was "well I saw XYZ on your IG so I thought you'd approve of this". Uhh thanks, rejected.. blocked on IG, quit IG, bye.

immibis 1y ago
That's just normal politics though? If you publicize that you have an interest in X, and you're on the board, and someone wants X from the board, isn't it normal they'd approach you first? Were you trying to require them to use a more formal process? The smaller the number of people involved, the less formal the processes yet (no matter how much bureaucracy you try to drown them in - in a small political system, drowning someone in bureaucracy is just a rude way of saying no).
- steveBK123 1y ago
  It was a third appeal to violate some building bylaws so they could make modification for personal use and exclusive benefit of communal property. They thought I just might like what they were doing and approve it the third time lol. edit to add more context: On condo boards you deal with a lot of self interested strong willed people who have unreasonable demands & complaints like - "why can't I just put a 1000 gallon hot tub on the roof above my neighbors bedroom without approval.. why do I need legal & architect review .. why do I have to pay for that review.. ". And on denial "hey I saw on your IG you went to an onsen once so I thought you'd like this idea!" If you wanna do wtf you want, get a house with a large lot away from neighbors. If you want to share walls/floors/ceilings with other people, get used to their being some requirements for common sense and decency.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Did the first denial say "no, now go away" or did it say "no, because water is much heavier than most people think and it will collapse the roof, so you need an engineering report"?

standardUser 1y ago

[flagged]

timcobb 1y ago

This reminded me of the time ~10 years ago I was at an event featuring Richard Stallman, and he started by say that no one was allowed to post photos of him on FB. This was to a room of hundreds of people, mostly hackers. I thought, "damn, if there's an uphill battle somewhere, this guy will find it!"

procaryote 1y ago
You allowed to have boundaries even if there's a few assholes who won't respect them
- accrual 1y ago
  In this example RMS made a request to the audience. A boundary would be something like "if you post photos of me to Facebook, you won't be invited to my conferences" or "if you do X, I won't interact with you". Might be difficult to enforce, but that's on the person making the boundary.
  - reverendsteveii 1y ago
    That's the defining feature of a boundary: you don't actually tell people what to do. You just tell them what you'll do. "Don't talk to me like that" is an ask, "Talk to me like that again and I'll leave" is a boundary.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lostmsu 1y ago
In US, if that was a private event, his request is legally binding.
- bobismyuncle 1y ago
  How would this work in practice if it was litigated? Wouldn't you need proof that this was expressly communicated to the specific individual that violated and that they did so knowingly? Seems like it probably isn't enforceable...

sannysanoff 1y ago

[flagged]

mvdtnz 1y ago

He wants to hang out with friends, but he wants his friends to never speak of it with their other friends?

zombitack 1y ago

After being friends with public people, I got in the habit of asking people in pictures before I post, regardless of if they're on Instagram or not. And I NEVER post kid pictures. I find these rules should be obvious to most people. I'll even ask my wife first, who is always just about to post the same set of pictures I am. It's the decent thing to do.

noman-land 1y ago
How often do you get a no?
- hoherd 1y ago
  I take personal pride in how many of my friends have online avatars that are candid portraits that I took of them while we were out doing whatever, and I have had numerous people contact me and ask me to remove all of their photos. In the past sometimes it was "replace my name in the tags with a pseudonym" but now it's "remove them all." This all happened before AI took over, so you can imagine how relieved many of those people are in the age of deepfakes. Candid portraits are my favorite kind of photo to take, but sadly in the modern age, I've chosen to take down almost all of my portraits. I still have a self-hosted photo sharing software set up that I personally use to look through my collection and can share past memories with people, including lots of portraits I would have previously posted online, but I think most people and I have our guard up against AI crawlers. AI crawlers have made the web much more hostile than it was in the past.
- elric 1y ago
  Not the original commenter, but my friends are aware of my picture preferences (as in: get that camera out of my face). I always say "no", and most people I know are fine with that. There are (or so I've been informed) some pictures of me on Facebook and Instagram. I don't have an account on either website so I can't see those pictures or even request to have them removed. Those were posted by the kind of older relatives who are impossible to educate on anything technology- (or consent-) related, and occasionally by friends-of-friends who snapped a pic while I was unawares. Whenever I take a picture of anyone, I always ask first, and I never post them anywhere public. Feels like common decency to me, but there is obviously no such thing as universal common decency, so YMMV.

panstromek 1y ago

A think this is partly why a lot of this activity moved into private group chats, where it's more naturally segregated by social circles. Most people around me are pretty active on social media but vast majority of that activity is not in the public profile.

imaginationra 1y ago

[flagged]

wouterjanl 1y ago
I don’t understand, what kind of marketing do you think this is? I’m OP. I setup the blog a while ago but only for the first time I thought of something that was actually worth writing about. Something needs to be the first post! I’m sorry you found it boring.

cess11 1y ago

I expect people to ask me before they publish documentation of where I've been and what I did on services like Instagram, and I usually decline the offer. Is this considered unreasonable elsewhere?

wormius 1y ago

This sounds like it should be an AITA post on reddit based on the comments in this thread.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nalekberov 1y ago

I'm visiting Instagram lately only to see funny reels sent from my friends. My Instagram timeline is consisting of 90% influencers and life coaches, who is going to tell me my life sucks because I don't do what they have to tell me to do and 10% my friends.

Funes- 1y ago

This bothered me a lot in the past. I want to be in full control of any information that is on the Internet concerning myself. Some of the people I know will add an appeasing comment before taking a picture: "don't worry, I won't upload it anywhere!", but most people will just post it willy-nilly all the same. By the way, during last Monday's blackout in Spain, I had a sense of this kind of burden being lifted from the atmosphere... the idea of nobody having the ability to record and publish anything anymore (for the duration of the blackout, at least), was quite interesting... relieving, even.

alistairSH 1y ago

Approaching zero of my friends are on Meta any more. Most have inactive accounts; a few have canceled outright. Those that are “active” are mostly limited to wishing each other happy birthday. Afaic, Meta pretty much killed their platforms by pumping rage-bait clicks instead of social content.

Barrin92 1y ago
Exactly my experience as someone in the ostensible target demographic, late twenties to mid forties social circle. Granted I'm German with most friends/family in central/Eastern Europe so a bit less Instagram obsessed than the Anglosphere but so much has moved to Whatsapp (technically Meta I guess, but not really a public facing social network), Signal, Telegram. And from what I see working with younger people out of uni, it's almost all private group chats, Discord, only real social platform seems to be TikTok. If there wasn't a date on the blog post I'd have guessed it was from 2017 or something, because the problem just feels obsolete now. Didn't Zuckerberg himself even say something to that effect?
asdff 1y ago
No one is active on social media anymore like they were in college or high school. People just age out or get too busy for that kind of stuff. They might lurk but posts are pretty rare for most people who would have been posting 3 times a day 15 years ago. I'm not sure if the younger generation is actually active anymore or if they also just lurk now. Dead internet theory and all...

raccoonhands 1y ago

if you're a passive person, there are most likely more famous people for them to judge and make fun of if that's what you're worried about who tarnish their images online every day! i look at posts like these like sharing a photo album with friends