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! :)
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.