Young Instagram Users Give Up Privacy in Search of Metrics
- Creating a ‘business’ account provides detailed analytics
- Users say they are businesses, in order to get the information
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Millions of young people are turning their personal Instagram accounts into “business” profiles to learn more about how their posts are performing. The trend has an unintended privacy consequence.
In order to be classified as a business on Facebook Inc.’s Instagram, users agree to provide their phone number or email to the public on the app. Their choice -- made much easier by Instagram’s design and prompting -- can endanger their privacy and that of their friends, according to David Stier, an independent data scientist who reported the issue to the company, and conducted a broad analysis on 200,000 accounts around the world with several different sampling techniques.