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.