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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a Facebook or Instagram account, but I definitely eat tacos and I was put off when I couldn't see a new taco place's opening hours without an instagram accoutn.

I'm not sure why you think why people who don't have a Facebook account wouldn't eat at restaurants

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There are ways to access public Instagram content without an account, gallery-dl for eg works most of the time. Tweeper can also be useful.

https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl https://git.ao2.it/tweeper.git

You're in a tiny enough minority that it doesn't matter to them. It's like Amish complaining that they can't use a drive-thru window or something. Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.

> Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.

And those 30 seconds are a harrowing pit of despair out of which comes the rest of your life filled with advertisements, tracking, second-guessing, and accusations of being a hypocrite.

To be fair, they've been shown to still track unauthenticated users via fingerprinting and mapping it to known data from your friends who do have Facebook and upload this data (phone numbers, first, last name, etc). NOT having an account doesn't mean you aren't being tracked.

Not that it means you should just make an account to make their tracking easier...

I haven't had any of that just from having an FB and IG account. I honestly forgot I had an IG account for a long time until someone shared something with me and I realized I had one.

I’m a little optimistic here. Step by small step lately the more normal people in my life have been joining this demographic.

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