Instagram is testing new iOS push notifications that include a profile photo. Each time the notification is shown on your screen, it triggers a GET request to fetch that image, letting Meta track ever

Yeah, just that now it's a tracking photo

@DrDystopia @Blaze It's a common pattern in email. Disappointing that we still have this problem, tbh.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy/_pixel

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I would be fairly surprised if they actually did this for tracking purposes. This sounds like nonsense to me. They already have plenty of information about you and they literally sent the notification.

Or Instagram belonging to Facebook? They already know.

Push notifications go through Apple servers.

HTTP GET request comes from the device loading the image; AFAIK though wouldn’t be a big deal if Apple’s servers loaded and cached it.

So Meta can watch for the GET requests and determine:

• time of delivery to device
• approximate location of the device
• device’s IP, used to correlate other activity done on that device gathered elsewhere by the IG/FB tracking network

And derive:

• what kind of connection you are using
• from where
• when
• what time of day and location do you most often read IG
• optimal time to try and distract you
• who your preferred service carriers are and if/when you change them
• how often you deviate from this pattern
• through correlation, determine what deviation might be significant based on other data collected from your device or nearby devices at the same time
• oh wow so and so didn’t look at IG much because they searched for baby clothes are they pregnant? Is a friend? Can we show more ads based on that angle to get sales?
• and other, much more devious, much grosser intrusions
• they get more sales from oblivious users
• they grow their panopticon

I think the point is they get to know the exact time you first see the notification. It's a massive flaw in the OS, and I believe I have read about this years ago already, so that "privacy OS" is not intending to fix this leak

I was addicted to scrolling instagram and would go for hours on end, it was pretty bad. I still wanted to have access just to keep up on a couple accounts I care about but I didn’t want to be doom scrolling, so I removed the app from my home screen and replaced it with my lemmy client so anytime I would instinctively open it without thinking I’d open lemmy instead, which I find less addicting. I still doom scroll a little but not nearly as bad.

I’ll eventually be deleting all social media but there’s a couple people I only have on instagram or facebook messenger who I don’t want to lose contact with. But for anyone struggling with just auto opening an app and doom scrolling without thinking, maybe remove the icon from your home screen and replace it with something less addicting.

For a while I used the web app because it was actually better - fewer ads and consistent UI. Not anymore.