So, I’m questioning my stance on social media apps. Recently I started talking to a girl on a dating site and after a few days of talking today, she asked for my Instagram ID. I don’t have an active Instagram account because I hate their data-hoarding practices. For nearly 6 years now, r/privacy has been stuffing into my brain that Instagram is inherently bad for privacy. So I avoided it. Now coming back to the situation, I remembered that I created a burner account long back and I hastily reactivated it. It had 0 followers, no name, no bio and was set to private. I changed the username, followed some random accounts and gave this Instagram account to that girl and while sharing my ID I made up a story that I deactivated my account several months ago and reactivated only recently and my followers “vanished” due to deactivation. She immediately got weird about it and asked whether I still used the account to which I replied yes and then she asked if I had any posts on that account, luckily I posted some shitposts and memes on that account and had a couple of story highlights. She softened her guard now and gave me a follow request. After going through my account she got somewhat reassured that I was a real person and was not a bot. This has got me questioning my stance on social media apps, like whether I should follow such a stringent No-No policy or should I follow a lax approach. Last year, the Clubhouse app was getting popular and every single one of my friends created accounts and hopped on to chat rooms but I didn’t even install it solely because of my philosophy of privacy. I’ve noticed that frequenting communities such as r/privacy and /c/privacy tends to make users form a more extreme take on privacy over time and it also makes them more and more anti-social over time. I was a social butterfly 10 years ago and had a ton of friends on Facebook, in 2015 I deleted my Facebook account and in 2017 I passively started visiting r/privacy, I immediately got into digital footprint cleansing and burned most of my accounts. I slowly became more anti-social and didn’t use any social network- no Instagram, Snapchat, Discord etc., This has taken a toll on my social life. And in this debacle, I don’t WISH to be anti-social, I’m anti-social but not in a voluntary manner. I’m in my prime years and I need friends and relationships at this age but my privacy standpoint is mangling with those. We all know that having a social life is essential for dating and that social life also includes the use of social media apps but my extreme takes on privacy disturbs all of this- like I change all my usernames every 3 months. This kind of practice is seen as “weird” and “extreme” by many. In my honest opinion, I think that a user should draw a line between privacy and social life and should stop things and analyse if they think things are going downhill and also consume privacy-related content in moderation.
Choosing to prioritize privacy will definitely affect your online social life—especially if you’re trying to get to know real people using your real identity. Privacy-centered communities are not the ones you should be blaming, however. This is just the unfortunate state of the Internet, and privacy communities simply make us aware of that truth.
A lot of us here are trying to find ways to push back against regulations and groups of people that are violating our privacy before it gets to a place where we no longer have a choice. Going upstream is always more challenging and less convenient than going with the flow, but the hope is that it will be worth it in the long run.
If your online social life is more valuable to you than privacy, you have the total freedom to choose how you want to balance that. Just be careful of projecting your own experience on everyone else.