Edward Snowden’s favourite app reveals the Instagram ads you’ll never see - because they show what they know about you
Simulation of Signal’s “The Instagram Ads you will never see”
There’s a lot of talk (here and elsewhere) about how we can exert control over the data we generate from our cyber-lives - whether to protect our individual and human rights, or decide ourselves how to use it (for fun, community or even profit).
But it’s not easy to get up to speed with what processes/system are monitoring and exploiting us - and one assumes, given the design powers of major info-corporations to addict us to their services, that’s a deliberate decision.
So we loved what Signal - the super-secure and encrypted social messaging app personally approved by Edward Snowden - tried out as an experiment with Instagram: “The Instagram Ads You Will Never See”.
An excerpt from their blog:
Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives.
This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past. The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.
However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.
We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea.⬇️
Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.
So, here are some examples of the targeted ads that you’ll never see on Instagram. Yours would have been so you.
