You, as a Network
As social media becomes an increasingly integral part of life. Some are starting to discuss how Instagram and other social media platforms understand you better than friends and family do in real life. In class, we often talk about social media as a larger web that connects individual nodes (people), but we don’t really zoom in further. Within each node of the broader social network of Instagram, there is another intricate web describing each person. These nodes within each user consist of data collected by Instagram. The network that makes up you as a user relates to the social networks we learned about in class because all of these data points have paths of relationships. Not only paths within users but also folders of much more specific user behavior.
Instagram collects an insane amount of information based on user’s actions on the app. Who do you search for, what kind of posts did you look at the longest, which posts did you like, who posted the post you didn’t like, who did you send it to, what type of news do you look at the most and anything else you can imagine. Some people are afraid of all this data collection and are starting to understand the impact of this privacy invasion.
These data points are often sold to third parties as marketing information. This type of data provides the most absolute information about a user compared to any marketing in the past. Most other marketing relates to broader market studies but with data collected by Instagram and other social media platforms, the marketing can be much more precise. This is because Instagram really understands you in a very intricate way.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/instagram-invasive-app-privacy-facebook-b1818453.html