How To Stop Instagram From Tracking Everything You Do
Instagram is a massive money-maker. Parent company Facebook doesn’t release figures on how much the division makes, but reports claim it generated $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019–that’s a quarter of Facebook’s entire yearly revenue. Or, to put it another way, more money than YouTube makes for parent company Alphabet.
At the heart of Instagram’s financial success is two things: advertising (the Stories feature it nabbed from Snapchat is now filled with it) and the data that powers all that advertising. There’s a lot of it.
Instagram, through its integrations with Facebook, uses your personal information to show you ads that it believes you’ll be mostly likely to click on. This information comes from what you do within the app and Facebook, your phone and your behavior as you move around parts of the web that Facebook doesn’t own. First off–everything you do on Instagram is tracked. Almost every online service you use collects information about your actions. Every thumb scroll made through your feed provides it with information about your behavior. Instagram knows that you spent 20 minutes scrolling to the depths of your high-school crush’s profile at 2 am.
