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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Meta will nuke your Instagram account for basically anything, including for no reason at all.

I have like 50 followers, 10 photos, and check my IG once every week or two - haven't posted anything in months.

Meta has banned me twice for unspecified policy violations (both times I had to send them a selfie and got reinstated, and there was no way to ask a human what these policies were).

I suspect they'll ban/unban me again someday, oh well, it's Meta and I don't care, I just make sure not to use them for anything essential...!

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> Meta will nuke your Instagram account for basically anything

Opened the app last week and had to click through an accept gate warning me if I keep using "Scraping tools" I'll lose my account.

The only "scraping" I've been doing is copying the direct image links and posting them to slack and my bookmarking service a few times a month.

Insane to me that they're red in the face threatening me to lose my account over having the audacity to just share a direct image link.

Garbage service.

Probably on of the tools you post it too _or posted it in_ runs a web-scrapper.

And there might be a person specific id in the link you get, which other people copying the image don't get.

For example edge did for a while scrap any link you visited with it, even if you logged out of exactly this feature, not running any heuristics about weather it might a a magic link and then skipping it and AFIK also not stripping query parameters (through it did respect robots.txt I think).

Similar a lot of apps do similar, sometimes not even respecting robots.txt.

Through in any case it's still Meta being rediculous, because it's a known issue and you can't fault your user for doing perfectly normal things in a world where even one of the major browsers behaves like malicious spyware wrt. urls/web scrapping without user explicit consent.

> And there might be a person specific id in the link you get

This is how they know I'm doing it, each url seems to be custom generated for the specific view of the post from an account because they actually expire too eventually. But you know "scraping" is like sharing what? 15 image links off the walled garden a month?

Just think it's an insane amount of effort to go to for them to try to make the internet stop working like the internet.

Upsets me this is where we got to with image sharing vs the open and remix culture of pre-yahoo Tumblr.

The solution is to simply stop using their services. That's how you reclaim the internet: by refusing to participate in walled gardens.

Oh that's interesting. Occasionally I use the Firefox inspector to view an image directly. I don't have the eyes of a 20 year old anymore and Instagram doesn't have a full screen button or any other way to enlarge an image.

Maybe they're picking up on that somehow and getting ornery about it.

IG was an app before they were a website and they have never embraced the open architecture of the web, nor been entirely comfortable with the browser as a user agent.

That raises another interesting topic, the US DoJ is becoming increasingly aggressive about applying the Americans with Disabilities Act toward websites. I wonder how well IG complies with the relevant standards like WCAG. Probably not well. We have noticed that any website which implements a lot of anti-user features tends to be extra bad in terms of accessibility for the disabled. I wonder if we will at some point see a Big Tech like Meta start to come under fire from the US government because their user-hostile features are also hostile toward the disabled and/or this results in them skirting ADA compliance.

Is it possible you're using some ad/JS-blocker or DNS blacklist, and Meta's silly tools are interpreting that as proof of a headless scraping client?

So far that's the best theory for why Reddit recently plunged my 13-year account into Kafkaesque censored limbo. And then did it again after a month of seeking answers on another account.

> Insane to me that they're red in the face threatening me to lose my account over having the audacity to just share a direct image link. > > Garbage service.

As long as you(and others) keep using it, theres really no reason for them not to

What option do I have, I work as a designer so it's where my career networks.

about the same option I have not to have linkedin, "its where my career networks".

Does it have some kind of opportunity cost? it probably does. I know people that got exciting job offers that would not have happened had they not been on linkedin, so I would guess I have lost out to some. Its the price I pay. Not going on linkedin

Your bookmarking service isn't like Raindrop.io or anything? Because that one might be seen as a "scraper".

> if I keep using "Scraping tools" I'll lose my account.

But you are using scraping tools? Why the quotes?

Or maybe I misunderstood and you are manually copying?

They just want your government id. It makes their data set more valuable to advertisers. So the extort it out of you after you're partly invested in the platform. The security thing is just cover.

That is why they often demand your phone number later too. If the demanded it during signup you'd know the deal you were making and would probably back out. So they do it after you're invested so you have something to lose instead of them.

Seems very plausible, but: [citation needed]

They want your selfies for facial recognition in order to track you better across the web and possibly resell that information to third parties.

Also a great dataset for "AI" training, so your face can appear in modified form in laundered pictures.

> They want your selfies for facial recognition in order to track you better across the web

How on earth does facial recognition help with tracking someone across the web?

If they get a match with a high school picture for "John Smith" from a school in an affluent area, they can adjust advertisements.

If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.

> If they get a match with a high school picture for "John Smith" from a school in an affluent area, they can adjust advertisements.

Right, it's not like they gather location data and insist on real world names or buy data from brokers or use cookies. Facial recognition is the missing piece of in the puzzle!

> If your face appears in a riot, they can resell the information to the government.

It's not like governments have databases with photo identification.

Being able to do it before has never stopped meta or google from wanting to do it harder and more effectively.

Retail store outlet surveillance video used to advertise to past store visitors

Similar to beacon advertising but instead of bluetooth it'll use your face.

"Welcome back Jim!"

If you've uploaded photos of yourself on other services and those services have agreements among themselves to share each others' (anonymized?) data, then you can be tracked across services through, among other things, your photos.

Nice theory. But quite different from what the OP claimed.

I think they want selfies to enforce a one-account-per-person policy, to limit scraping. They already enforce phone verification, but there's plenty of ways around that (e.g. services that redirect verification SMS from hacked phones, or just buy phone-verified accounts from someone else). Facial recognition raises the bar and gives them extra confidence that two accounts are unrelated even if they have similar IPs/access patterns/whatever

Guessing that'd really suck for anyone who seems to be a lookalike for someone else. :/

Twins are against the meta EULA

For this reason I decided to give up Instagram completely -- my account was flagged for whatever reason that I cannot possibly understand, and I would rather not use the service than give them my selfie

god save GDPR!

> god save GDPR!

When it will be enforced ...

They banned my account that I have never posted anyting with less than a month after I created it for violating community guidelines. The message told me it was final and I had no way to appeal the decision. Apparently not posting anything can be a violation of their community guidelines.

Had this too the other day. I am 100% certain that the ban is just a ploy to force you to give them more personal data. In my case it was a phone number, next up maybe a selfie.

Someone probably wants your account removed to release your username.

I had the same experience. I barely use it but somewhat active mostly follow friends. Post a picture of food mainly. And one day banned/blocked for no reason other than some vague violation. Stupid selfie to unlock.

+1 they told me I could only unban by adding a mobile number, which I have no interest in giving them. It's fine! Certainly not a service I'd rely on.

That's nothing. Meta may ask you to send them a picture of your government issued ID to be unbanned.

They promise to delete images within 30 days (yeah they may delete images, but for sure not the metadata).

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