Instagram

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Instagram Asking Users to Share Their Birthday

Charlotte Henry ·

Instagram announced Monday that it is asking users to confirm their birthday if they have not shared it with the photo-sharing service before. Pavni Diwanji, VP of Youth Products at the Facebook-owned app, said in a blog post that it was aiming to create better safety features for younger users.

First, we’ll start to ask you for your birthday when you open Instagram. We’ll show you a notification a handful of times and if you haven’t provided us with your birthday by a certain point, you’ll need to share it to continue using Instagram. This information is necessary for new features we’re developing to protect young people. Second, if you see warning screens placed on posts, we’ll ask you for your birthday before you can see the post. These screens aren’t new, and we already show them on posts that may be sensitive or graphic, but we don’t currently ask for your birthday when viewing these posts. Now, we’ll start asking for your birthday on some of these screens if you haven’t shared it with us previously.

Podcast

Travel Tips, Wi-Fi Troubleshooting, and Dave Got Caught! — Mac Geek Gab 885

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · Add Comment

It’s always interesting when multiple listeners have the same problem, and today you can listen as John and Dave dig into issues with Mac minis and restarting. We think your two favorite geeks have the answer! And that’s what happens here, you ask questions, we provide answers… and Quick Tips… and Cool Stuff Found, too! Press play and enjoy learning at least five new things!

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Instagram Launches Control for Viewing Sensitive Content

Andrew Orr ·

Instagram has launched a Sensitive Content Control feature for content that appears in the Explore tab.

This new feature gives you control over sensitive content. You can decide to leave things as they are or you can adjust the Sensitive Content Control to see more or less of some types of sensitive content. We recognize that everybody has different preferences for what they want to see in Explore, and this control will give people more choice over what they see.

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How to Safely See Your Top 9 Instagram Photos of 2020

Andrew Orr ·

Your Top 9 Instagram posts of each year is a trend that has been going on for several years now. You probably don’t want to give websites access to your Instagram account just to see these photos. Or, maybe you don’t care. In any case, CNN has a short guide to safely do it with apps called Top Nine and Best Nine.

When you give your email to Top Nine, the service uses it to send you your yearly roundup, but may also contact you in the future for marketing, the company’s privacy policy says. The emails may come from Top Nine and its affiliate companies, but each one will contain instructions on how to “opt-out” of these messages.

If it doesn’t automatically use your email from Instagram, you could try a disposable email service like TempMail.

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Ignore Instagram. TODAY is Election Day in the US

Andrew Orr ·

Certain Instagram users found out on Tuesday that when they opened the app, they saw a banner that said, “Tomorrow is Election Day.” Ignore that because as you’ll see everywhere else in the news, TODAY is Election Day. Also, check out Charlotte’s article if you want to stay informed of the results.

“While we turned off the ‘Tomorrow is Election Day’ notice last night, it was cached for a small group of people if their app hadn’t been restarted,” Instagram wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, responding to a number of users who had received the message. “It’s resolving itself as people restart.”

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Instagram’s “Unlink Account” Feature is Deceiving

Andrew Orr ·

Instagram’s Unlink Account feature is deceiving, at least when it comes to Facebook. Since Instagram is a Facebook company your two accounts will forever be connected.

That’s because the wealth of data that Facebook collects through its multiple services is more than enough to properly identify users’ various accounts and link them to one another. Even in cases where a different name, email address, or device was used to create each account—be it a throwaway WhatsApp profile, stalker Instagram account, or joke Facebook profile—Facebook often is able to suss out who is actually behind the account and whether they have accounts on other Facebook-owned apps.

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iOS 14 Reveals Facebook Spying on Your Camera Through Instagram

Andrew Orr ·

Facebook is being accused of accessing peoples’ cameras through Instagram, thanks to a iOS 14 feature that tells you when your camera is active.

Facebook denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting, for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras.

In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”

Facebook: “It’s a bug because you weren’t supposed to know we were doing this.”

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Instagram: Please Give Us Your Government ID

Andrew Orr ·

Instagram will start asking “suspicious accounts” to verify their identity with a government ID. Instagram claims this will help users understand when accounts are “attempting to mislead their followers” although it’s not clear what kind of behavior the Facebook-owned company thinks is suspicious. One reason is shared: If most of your followers are in a different country than you.

IDs will be stored securely and deleted within 30 days once our review is completed, and won’t be shared on the person’s profile as pseudonymity is still an important part of Instagram.

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Instagram Seems to Think it’s a Startup When it Comes to an iPad App

Andrew Orr ·

When asked why there isn’t an Instagram iPad app yet, CEO Adam Mosseri said the company would like to create one, “But we only have so many people, and lots to do, and it hasn’t bubbled up as the next best thing to do yet.”

Instagram users have been asking for an official ‌iPad‌ app nearly since the social network launched in 2010, the same year that the first ‌iPad‌ was released. Some alternatives include third-party Instagram apps for ‌iPad‌, browsing Instagram on the web on ‌iPad‌, or using the upscaled iPhone app on ‌iPad‌.

The obvious answer is, “Hire more people because you’re owned by one of the richest corporations in the world: Facebook.” But I wonder what the actual answer is. Invasive tracking isn’t as lucrative on iPadOS?