The social network Meta* has effectively abandoned its previous level of confidentiality in Instagram. Users noticed that the company changed its approach to protecting private correspondence: end-to-end encryption of messages was either disabled or significantly limited, while the information about these changes was hidden within updated service policies.
Now correspondence, photographs, voice messages, and other content may be accessible for analysis by the platform itself. At the same time, there were practically no public statements regarding such a serious policy change — the modifications were introduced quietly through updates to the user agreement and the system’s internal settings.
The official explanation from Meta* sounds rather vague: supposedly, too few people used the end-to-end encryption feature, while maintaining it created difficulties for content moderation. In addition, encrypted chats had long caused dissatisfaction among various government structures because they complicated control over illegal activity, the distribution of prohibited materials, and the digital monitoring of users.
Against the backdrop of these changes, the question is increasingly being raised as to whether anonymity on the internet exists at all. Many users still blindly believe that VPNs, private messengers, and “secret chats” are capable of completely hiding their activity. However, in practice, almost every action online leaves a digital footprint: IP addresses, device data, geolocation, cookies, activity history, behavioral analytics, and metadata make it possible to compile detailed digital profiles of millions of people. Moreover, correspondence, voice messages, phone calls, as well as background audio surveillance and even background video recording are being collected.
Large IT corporations have long turned user data into one of the most valuable resources in the modern World. Even if the content of messages is formally encrypted, platforms still receive a huge amount of accompanying information — who communicates with whom, how often, from which location, from which device, and at what time. This data often turns out to be no less valuable than the correspondence itself.
Digital security experts have repeatedly warned that absolute anonymity on the internet practically does not exist. Any services, cloud platforms, and social networks can change the rules of the game unilaterally, especially when pressure from authorities, the advertising market, or international regulators intensifies.
The Instagram* situation once again demonstrates how conditional the concept of “personal space” in the modern internet has become. While users continue to freely share their lives on social networks, the platforms themselves gain increasingly greater opportunities for analyzing, storing, and controlling information.
You are probably asking yourself, “why do they need our data?” The answer is simple: control and manipulation in order to achieve commercial, political, and military goals, and that is only the minimum, not even mentioning scientific experiments on the consciousness of society.
*Banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.
