My Reaction to My Instagram Data (Sunday Story #3)

by Lucas MacCallum

I opened my Instagram data and I was honestly not too shocked at the things that showed up. There were only really two things that actually struck me as I scrolled down my information. The first being data stored on “story responses” as well as the section labeled “Ad interests”.

Story Responses

Merely the concept of data collection on story activity is a bit unnerving because stories are marketed as having a “24 hour lifetime”. Although this is not as serious as it may be in the case of Snapchat, where the whole brand is based around secrecy and the content’s lack of longevity, the fact that it is all documented means that there clearly is no such thing as a “24 hour lifetime” on any of these apps.

Ad Preferences

When I saw this section, I was not disturbed by the fact that my Ad preferences are tracked, but the fact that Instagram is okay with showing it to us in such a broad fashion. For someone who doesn’t have the same info that we do it could be a scary wake up call. Looking at my list, I see little to no actual accurate data. I am usually not the biggest beauty guru (shocking I know), and I prefer most sports to soccer. This is not really the problem though, this use of data in order to target ads has been so normalized that Instagram is comfortable just showing this to its consumers. This poses a scary question: what happens when these small normalized violations start to grow into bigger ones?

General Thoughts

Overall, looking at my Instagram data was neither shocking nor really scary. However, some of the sections lead me to make claims about the future and present of social media data collection, and the normalization of it.