I’d guess the simple answer may be that people don’t care/know, but for those that have ditched Facebook for whatever reason, yet still use Instagram, it’s a little surprising.
Is it partly a result of it being a more focused/limited form of social media that filters out some of the stuff people didn’t like from Facebook?
I think people underestimate the scale of surveillance/tracking. People lump it in with “oh it’s just advertising”, similar to all the commercials you watch on tv. But it’s a completely different beast. Personally my eureka moment was when I set up a pi-hole and saw the staggering amount of creepy tracking on my devices.
Pi-hole? Pardon my ignorance but could you elaborate?
https://pi-hole.net/
It’s a network level ad-blocker by blocking at the DNS level.
It was originally meant to run on a raspberry pi, but will run in docker or other Linux os as well. Very light weight and a great self-host project. Been running for years and support via patreon.
Awesome! Didn’t even know of its existence until now. Thanks for the heads up!
I’ll add that you can buy a $30 used “thin client” pc via eBay and set up Ubuntu server (or your choice of Linux distro) then set up pi-hole on it. Cheap project, lots of value
Pi-hole is software that runs typically but not necessarily on a raspberry pi. It maintains a list of known advertising and tracking servers and blocks them by rerouting at the DNS level. For example an embed in a page tells your computer to contact tracking.facebook.com pihole tells your computer that that website is at 0.0.0.0 instead of it’s real IP address. Nifty thing is that you can redirect all of your DNS queries at the router so even devices that can’t normally run ad blockers can take advantage of it.