Personal Data: Instagram Is a Real Tattletale | Hacker News Reader

Personal Data: Instagram Is a Real Tattletale

statista.com

82 pointsURfejk16 comments

When the first thing I see after opening a website is some sort of "Give us your email just for some useless newsletter honest" popup I just close the site as fast as I can.

How ITF can such a disgustingly annoying UX element still be so prevalent on certain genres of websites?

I suppose there's no reputational cost if it has become the norm.

The same thing has happened with We care about your privacy dark-patterns. Otherwise reputable sites like Tom's Hardware pay little reputation cost for trying to trick the user into granting full cookie permissions.

I have thought about this a bit. My take is that almost all of these blog posts are from one-off contributors and not one you'll see over and over. I kind of see it as them taking their shot as making you a recurring visitor or recurring reader of their content. I've personally never heard of Statista and don't think I ever will again, if past experience is an indicator. I don't fault them for that, although it is slightly annoying.

Though if it were me, I'd personally wait until someone was partway through the article at least before presenting a newsletter sign up. There's no way I'd sign up for a newsletter before I saw the site's content.

I do exactly the same. If I see a popup covering a significant portion of the popup I just close the tab. It is rare that I am interested enough to actually click though, when the title is "Facebook tracks you" it definitely isn't worth it to me.

But I guess it is clear that we are the oddballs. If everyone was like is these behaviours would disappear.

This is a bizarrely misleading take from iOS 14 privacy labels. Use for ads optimization/measurement/targeting does not mean sharing with third parties for FB/IG or anyone who runs their own ads stack.

Privacy labels also tell you if your data is being shared with third parties.

The data is sourced from pCloud[1]. Highly recommend checking their site out if you want to know more then the linked story's summary. They show what each of the referenced categories are and also compare it to a whole slew of other apps.

[1] https://blog.pcloud.com/invasive-apps/

And statista.com contribute to it as they share cookies with Facebook after their cookie manager. Unless you click on the small text "Confirm my choices" instead of the big blue button.

Its not clear what this is. May be I am overthinking this but it could be one of two --

1. Is Instagram collecting a lot of data and sharing 79% of that with third parties on their end?

2. Is Instagram collecting 79% of the user data available to third party apps on iOS?

If it's 1, as I suspect it is, then is it through their ads sdk? If so, how does an external entity get this estimate of 79%?

So many other questions come up too. Why is it listed separately from FB app? Do they have a separate ad sdk for Instagram and FB? I thought the number just means that Instagram is more valuable to services and so buy more there.

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