It has been quite a controversy when it comes to these digital social media platforms concerning their data collection for monetary use. It must come as no surprise that these companies collect personal data, which might be considered unsafe or unethical. There is a clear distinction between a safe data collection and one which involves sensitive and highly personal matters. Even further, most social media users refrain from sharing any data to these platforms. Yet, these things are hard to explain logically and are even harder to stop.
People usually argue among themselves what data does Instagram collect. Sometimes a user says things in random conversation only to see an ad of relevant material to the topic of the user’s conversation. Although, these sorts of suspicious matters have grown quite considerably, nevertheless, have become a matter of conflict between the users and the platform.
What is a safe data collection?
Instagram narrates in their privacy policy that they only collect a user’s information regarding their product. This involves the interests, pages of preferences, type of content, amount of time spent on a specific range, etc. These are just some of the standard metrics that Instagram’s analytics record and use to improve the user experience of their particular application. By the way, this sort of information can be categorized both as safe and free to use. As far as Instagram is concerned, at first glance, they only record such type of information. Any other information is of no use to them.
What data is beyond the borderline?
In reality, things are far messier than they are portrayed on the streamline. This is because Instagram has been accused just like Facebook which stores much more personal and private data and unfortunately uses it to its advantage. This type of data involves chat history, passwords, metadata, transactional data from these websites, facial recognition data, and so on. This sort of personal information is highly unethical to use and therefore is potentially illegal. Earlier Facebook and then google were accused of using private data to potentially use it for monetary reasons. This topic in today’s environment is crucial to ponder on as everything happens in the digital realm in corporate and personal life.
How does Instagram use this data?
Instagram can use this data in many different aspects in order to generate money. These platforms usually make most of their money through ads display. To produce relevant ads for relevant people, the algorithm uses its information to provide these ads. In this case, they not only make money through ad display, but they charge a premium in order to allow these marketing companies to use their information so that it helps to market their product to the potential customers. Surely this presents Instagram with a win-win situation in terms of profit generation. However, it makes logical reasoning in terms of how marketing products can work through using such vital information. Therefore, the regulating authorities must consider this situation.