Hello,

yes, I use Instagram even though I don’t like it because well all of my friends does and I can’t convince them to use something else. it’s really sad how hard it is to convince people to join open networks specially in fascist country like India where people are just boot lickers of politicians and rich people. but I digress.

I found the other day that google analytics can be easily tricked since it doesn’t verify the input. you can just open network tab and watch for any request going to https://www.google-analytics.com/ and just copy that request as curl command now you can tweak the parameters of the query and it will just accept it. ig, you can say I have 1920x1080 monitor and google will just accept it. it’s an effective way to fill up google analytics with garbage data to the point that it’s harder to separate real data from the garbage data.

now I want to know if there is something similar to poison data of Instagram/Facebook/Meta. I opened network tab on instagram but couldn’t find anything interesting.

any help would be appreciated! :)

  • Supercrunchy@programming.dev
    2·
    10 hours ago

    My suggestion is to use some privacy focused browser for instagram, like other commenters said. If you don’t want to move fully to another browser, then at least use that browser only for insta. I would still expect them to be able to track you, since they likely have a big team working on the tracking tools. It’s their entire product after all… I am not on instagram so I don’t know if it works, but another thing you can do is to make it a game to click the least interesting things you see on your feed. Go in the post, spend a bit of time there, if you are feeling like putting effort drop a like or comment too. Pick the lowest effort posts, things you would never do or buy, but I would avoid politics (you don’t want to start seeing biasing content that might actually succeed in changing your opinion). All modern platforms will start showing more and more of that extremely uninteresting content and make the feed less addictive to you and I think also your friends. Don’t click or linger too much on an interesting thing on your feed, just duckduckgo it from the other browser instead. The interests data is the most valuable thing they have on you, and they know all your friends so they know who you are even if you used pseudonyms. It’s hard at the beginning, but it gets easier as the suggestions get worse. You don’t have to spend much time on that too.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
    9·
    1 day ago

    If you don’t use any identifiable information for the account (i.e email, post any photos with your face, or real name, that you use for anythinh else), use a VPN, an anti-fingerprinting browser like Mullvad, and most importantly use IG just for DM and nothing else, you should be pretty ok. Just the people you talk to (and what you talk about) will give them plenty of data, tho.

    One way to avoid having to use the website or their apps at all is to run your own Matrix server with meta-bridge, which can bridge Messenger (and I think even IG DMs, never tried that tho), so you minimize the contact surface you have with their site, because you are chatting through an unrelated app.

    If you don’t do most of that, Meta already has a shadow profile on you anyway, since they track stuff across websites based on numerous fingerprinting methods. I never really looked into it, but AFAIK most of websites have the “FB like” widget that Meta uses to track people across the internet, and I’d guess that Meta is pretty good at working with that data.

    Not sure about directly poisoning the analytics, but you could just run something like a VM with a pyton script with Selenium that just randomly browses web or IG.

  • Scratch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    Doing so, to an obvious degree might get your account banned. So, care might be required.

    If they have other methods of collection they maybe be able to just filter out the noise.