Automatically creating a shadow account for everyone on Instagram?
Even allowing people to follow that account?
Sounds like they really wanted to push Threads out the door in a big way.
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Actually, to Meta’s credit here, they do transparently say this when you make an account.
You can send follow requests to all of your Insta friends, and once they activate a Threads profile, they will see any follow requests they may have gotten.
They did this with Facebook accounts to instagram too. My brother has never downloaded instagram yet he’s my top follow suggestion all the time and it just uses his Facebook profile picture automatically
Why does everything have to be a conspiracy with some people? Threads literally and directly explains that it uses your Instagram account. They’re the same account. Nothing crazy. No magic. No oogie boogie. Just the same account.
It definitely is oogie boogie, which is what makes it illegal in europe as it’s against gdpr, which is why it’s not available in europe.
They’re doing some dodgy stuff with your data, that’s for sure. But the sign-up is smooth. Instagram has a LOT of users, and Meta is leveraging that and making it super easy to share to IG that you have made said threads account (and if you don’t, they will do it for you). The FOMO is real.
They have taken the biggest challenge to use a new social media platform, rebuilding your spidery web of follows, mutuals, weird interests, and friends, and made it basically transparent. It’s a UX marvel. The sign-up numbers reflect that IMO.
Sharing data of users from one company to another company without their consent is literally what GDPR exists to stop. Instagram is one company. Threads is another company.
If it isn’t oogie boogie then it literally wouldn’t have massive legislation against it preventing it worldwide for eu citizens.
Is threads a separate company though? It’s pretty explicit in saying “Threads an Instagram App”
In European law it doesn’t matter. You try and bypass laws and the courts have none of it. It’s very “fuck around find out”. They already decided against them for antitrust for doing exactly that.
That was the ruling [PDF] from the European Union’s highest court, the Court of Justice, when it upheld a decision by German antitrust regulators that Meta had abused its dominance in social media by milking users for information and swirling it together to serve up ads to users.
If you bypass shit in the EU they slap you with something else and make an example of you.
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If you signed up for Valve in the EU for like Left 4 Dead or Half Life or something, it would be against the law for them to share that account with Steam?
Account linking is usually done through a system that you opt into, agreeing to have that link.
This is entirely different, it’s just “fuck it we’ve got all this data, we’ll share it across and use it regardless of consent or not”.
While for other things it’s a completely external registration, for example I have a Steam account but also have to make a completely separate Capcom account for Street Fighter, then link the two together.
The key component is that the end user consents before any data is shared, whereas Meta’s approach is just to do it regardless of consent, treating your private information as something you don’t have a right to control.
None of the data other than the user name is shown in Threads until the user from Instagram activates their account. I’ve tried to look up a number of the people from Instagram on Threads and if they haven’t signed up, then the search results are zero.
It’s basically just a new feature for Instagram, but in a new app because it’s too different from the standard Instagram feed.
Being able to use the same credentials for logging in is something else than creating a public profile for users that never signed up for the service.
but they don’t create a public profile for users that don’t sign up? it uses the same handle as your Instagram. If you never activate Threads then nothing happens with your IG username on Threads
I did not try Threads so I do not know. The post suggests that your user handle appears as a suggestion of a profile to follow for other people even if you never signed up.
Yes. It does. Much like every other site when you inject a contacts information. It will ask if you want to follow them when they sign up.
That’s literally all this is.
Your correct in a technical sense (eccept for mabe the fetaverse linkages) but not a semantic one,
Yes its absolutely technically true that people delete their unified account from the “other place to do so called threads account management page”
but semantically its a “new service” that they were “signed up for” with its own app, and if/when they delete their “threads account” everything else goes with it for some odd reason
Facebook and their dumb opaqeness
Also if you click one of the users who haven’t signed up yet it just pre-queues your follow and says “You’ll automatically follow then when/if they join threads”(I don’t remember the exact wording here). This is blown out of proportion.
You need to activate the threads account. People are being asked to follow accounts which haven’t been activated IE created.
You’re missing the point.
The point being what, exactly? That convenience is horrendous, even when that convenience makes sense given its the exact same platform using the exact same architecture that will likely be folded into one universal app at some point in the future?
Oh noooooo. What an awful conspiracy that a company would do the thing that is obvious and makes sense. How terrible.
Lemmy is your chance to have a discussion without the needless hostility that Reddit et al has. Maybe try saying “I actually find it quite convenient, here’s why” etc
That wasn’t exclusive to reddit, nor was your smug attitude.
Welcome to the Internet
They weren’t smug at all. They suggested you not be hostile. It’s not a crazy idea.
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Cope.
Thank you. I will. Enjoy your stay.
You’re from reddit aren’t you?
It’s your chance to derail every conversation into petty social media drama so you can reinforce your fragile superiority complex, that’s for sure.
Please leave.
No. Learn to take an ounce of sarcastic criticism when the option presented has no merit. Alternatively, get over it and move on instead of tryin to police who is on the website.
How utterly Reddit of you.
How about you use the most basic social etiquette available and be at least not a total asshole.
And how about I take this chance to remind everyone that we can all block the users we don’t want to interact with. And that maintaining a block list is a great way to ensure a decent online experience
The block list should be shared, too, like a reputation chain or collaborative filter. “You and user X have both blocked Users A, B, and C. User X has also blocked D. Would you like to, too?” We can each decide the kind of moderation we want to see.
I don’t think I’m missing any point. Have you used it? They’re owned by the same company. Threads is separate but part of Instagram. Other than the user name being reserved on Threads in case the Instagram user wants to sign up, there isn’t an account created. If you try to search the name of any of those accounts in Threads it doesn’t come up at all. (Edit: mistyped a word)
Argh
So think of it like a ‘feature’ of Instagram then. You can enable the feature or you can leave it disabled but either way its sharing user data and login information etc.
Can we please stop with the misinformation campaign.
Everyone on here is trying to pat each other on the back by being better than Reddit.
So far no one on here acts differently from Reddit, no matter how much you guys like to pretend lol.
“Shadow accounts” lol. It’s literally your instagram account. Threads is built on top of Instagram. None of this is some hidden secret.
I’d you have to create a threads account, which shares and logins to your Instagram account, for it to be active, but people are being sent advice to follow accounts which haven’t been activated, then this is bad faith behaviour and not misinformation.
not really. If the account never activates on Threads then nothing happens. It’s just a convenience. If they don’t offer this feature then you have to consistently keep checking to see when your friends activate their account and go find them. It’s objectively a worse experience to do it that way
Sir, this is Lemmy.
I don’t see anybody posting there after the first day, save for brand and meme pages
That is just messed up.
Oh no the social network’s new app uses the social network from the old app…
What did you expect? Honestly, this doesn’t seem nefarious, just a smart way to bootstrap your new product.
Keep in mind, they technically don’t even have to use Instagram’s internal data to do that, they could have scraped publicly available Instagram / Twitter data to do the same.
Yeah. Even people HERE (who are totally computer experts because they use the internet and sign up for betas…) complain about how “confusing” it is to make an account for mastodon.
This handles that for you. Have an instagram account? your threads is just an opt-in to activate.
This happened to me. Joined threads and what do I see? Signal and instantly had a bunch of random accounts follow me.
I think I’m sticking to Mastodon and Pixelfed.
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In fairness, it’s pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.
Why would anyone be surprised by this? Zuckerberg would have to be a complete idiot to not use Instagram’s existing social graph for Threads.
What I’m surprised about is that he didn’t use Facebook.
Same here. I reread it because I thought I missed the word “Facebook”.
If you look carefully at Meta’s actions in the last few years, you’ll notice they’re slowly stepping away from the Facebook brand and product. I suspect that they no longer internally consider Facebook to be their main product, giving way for Instagram, which at the moment is a lot more popular and despite the obvious association doesn’t have a tainted name the same way Facebook does.
I wondered if it might be something to do with the real name policy on Facebook. Instagram is closer to Twitter in not having such a policy.
That was my first thought as well. Facebook is simply too different to Twitter in ways that Instagram is actually similar. On Facebook you’re blogging your life for others to follow. On Instagram and Twitter people are blogging a little of their own, but most users are there to follow others (usually big names or important people) and to comment on events those larger names are blogging about.
Not being up on (or caring about) what evil Meta is up to I was wondering how they got 90M users overnight, that splains it.
Thanks for the reminder to delete my Instagram account. Though I’ve never posted anything there, I’ve used it to follow some people.
Is it too much to hope that all of Meta crashes and burns? It’s infuriating seeing Meta, and corporations like them, harvest all of our information…
What I can’t figure is… who sits down and thinks “fuck Elon Musk and Twitter, I’m sick of this bullshit” and then follows that logic with “you know what I need more of in my life? Fuckin’ FACEBOOK, yeah.”
Yes it does feel like swapping a ticket for the Titanic with a ticket for the Lusitania.
They might not be real supporters. They are probably shill accounts forum sliding and doing the same things to control consensus they have done everywhere else.
This is so true. I wish there was a will/way to eliminate bots altogether on a platform. The more popular a platform is, the more bots swarm in to sway the opinions of the crowd - political opinions, consumer opinions, you name it. Reddit was lousy with bots. Constant ceaseless opinion farming. What’s to stop Lemmy from becoming just as obnoxious?
I think novelty is an unfortunately large part of this. I day unfortunately because I think it’s very lame that we find creating accounts on servers providing the same service as another service we already an account on … interesting.
“We were promised flying cars and instead got 160 characters”. Well now we’ve got 160 characters … twice?!
Meaningless superficial cheap FOMO weaponised as advertising fodder. Shameful really.
Nice little webcomic that captures the sentiment: https://mastodon.social/@robcottingham/110679764036454402
So far Threads has been blocked in the EU because of data privacy concerns. If they don’t show that their code is keeping data stored safely and in the EU it will continue being flagged in all appstores.
And now Meta knows when she’s having her period, the phone number of her gynecologist, and what period products she buys… thanks to the app spying on her health and fitness, contact, and shopping data.
#WTF
In other news, Facebook Messenger somehow knows I have a Facebook account!
They’re not creating a shadow account, you’re literally logging in with your instagram account.
What this post is implying, is that the user numbers are just existing instagram accounts, which doesn’t make sense because in that case they’d have 2 billion users within the first second.
You can follow/request to follow before the user has actually “created” the account, so they’re lying about which users have done that already, not about how many users they actually have.
Come at me downvotes
I think you’re right. It looks like Instagram too. I feel like it’s Instagram with a focus on words.
You can’t really follow someone until they’ve made an account. Threads has an option where you can go into settings and find a list of your Instagram following list. From there, you can make it so you follow certain people as soon as they join Threads.
Yeah, I signed up for it, they have an option for you to pre-follow people for when they sign up to threads
Does that person who has been pre-followed then get a notification to join and respond/follow back?
Because that would be a great way to boost the new service exponentially.
Yes they do
This is the moment the account is made. Even if the other person doesn’t respond or has even created an account. That’s how they are driving up their numbers.
So long as you have an account you could potentially have a Threads account without your knowledge.
Meta is 100% artificially working the accounts.
I hate meta just like the next person, but I‘m not sure how that’s supposed to boost accounts, since you’re literally just seeing these once you already have the account.
They are of course using their advantage in providing you your existing following list /followers. And they’re definitely happy to push it, but this post is implying something that strikes me as plain wrong.
