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.
That doesn’t sound like her getting spooked because you didn’t have an insta, it sounds like she got spooked because instead of being straight up and going “I mean, I do, but it’s old and I never really used it at all” you got weird and made up some weird BS about it.
And I know it’s that because not only would it make me raise an eyebrow if some random did something like that to me, I always tell people “Unless you’ve got a Whatsapp, its either text me or call me. The two social medias i have are ancient, I barely used em in the past, and the logins are lost to time I’m pretty sure.” Never given people weird vibes or anything by being honest like that, and we more often than not have a pretty nice time.
Also, being mindful of one’s privacy does not make said person anti-social. I’m pretty protective of mine, but i still reach out and talk to my friends and family near daily via face to face or messaging, am pretty receptive to a stranger or acquaintance wanting to have a chat or a coffee with me after work, all that jazz. That I don’t like the thought of Meta, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft snooping around people’s info, trivial as it may or may not be and thus distince myself from them (within reason, mind. I can cut myself off completely, but that’d be making both life, work, and everything inbetween too much of an unnecessary hassle), doesn’t diminish any of that.